


In Dreams

by acaseofthemondays



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Soulmate AU, WinterShock - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-02-06 18:40:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 35,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12823680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaseofthemondays/pseuds/acaseofthemondays
Summary: Darcy Lewis knew she had a soulmate, had known since she was four years old and the first burn of his consciousness bloomed across hers.





	1. A Riddle Inside My Head

**Author's Note:**

> That's right, another soulmate fic. Just what we all wanted. My first take on the soulmate trope, featuring Darcy Lewis and James Barnes. 
> 
> This fic brought to you by the letter A for Angst, the letter D for Denial, and the letter B for eventual Bedsharing. Because I have no chill. None.

Darcy Lewis knew she had a soulmate, had known since she was four years old and the first burn of his consciousness bloomed across hers. Soulmates were rare these days, though not unheard of. It took a confirmation from her pediatrician and a recommended child psychologist before her parents were convinced that she was indeed half a soulmate pairing and not just a child like any other with a highly active imagination. 

It took her family all those months of doctor's appointments before they knew, but she had known from the very first feeling of him (the burn of cold, the strangely clinical nature of his mind, the strange numbness of her left arm) that he was  _ real _ and somewhere in the world. 

It wasn’t until the Triskelion fell and the identity of the Winter Soldier was dumped onto the internet, along with every dirty secret that S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra ever had, that she realized exactly  _ who  _ her soulmate was. 

And it fit. 

All of it. The burning cold, the strange quality of his mind, the dreams of blood and despair that left her shaking in her bed, the frequent pains that bloomed across her body throughout her life and placed the shadow of fear in her parents eyes. 

When she was young, but old enough to know that the world sometimes liked to hurt children, she thought that her soulmate must have been abused by someone in his life. It would explain the searing pains that would plague her little body. It would explain the sometimes skittish, sometimes blunt feeling of his thoughts. He was traumatized, her soulmate. He was somewhere in the world and he was being  _ hurt.  _ It broke Darcy’s little heart and she ached to find him and protect him. 

Perhaps that was why she was so utterly compassionate as a person. Why she would face the danger of death to save the lives of animals in a soon to be annihilated pet shop. Why she chose political science as her field of study. She wanted to get into politics so she could help people, because she  _ cared. _

She couldn’t save her soulmate from his suffering, not yet, but she could attempt to save the world while she waited. 

But then a god fell from the sky and another tried to conquer the earth and then fucking  _ space elves _ tried to murder the entire universe, and Darcy found herself in the middle of a “Big Picture” situation and the saving of the earth via lobbying the U.S. government didn’t hold the same appeal as it once did. But staying with Jane did. So she stuck with her boss and let the dream of poli sci die. 

And Frigga bless Jane, because the woman had believed her, without question, when Darcy had admitted that she thought the Winter Soldier might be her soulmate. She hadn’t even hesitated, just swallowed her bite of bagel and sat next to Darcy where she was poring over the Hydra info drop. They spent three days making a Timeline of the Winter Soldier’s life and of Darcy’s memories of her soulmate, matching each point, until they knew without a doubt that he was her other half. 

It made her sick inside. And afraid. 

So very  _ afraid. _

A kid from an abusive home, she could handle. Hell, she’d been reading psychology books about those kinds of children and what it did to them since she was 13. She wanted to be ready for him, to understand him and help if she could. 

But this? 

She didn’t have the tools to deal with the mess that was her soulmate. 

So she didn’t. 

She kept working with Jane, building bridges to other worlds in the hopes that their work would provide answers to problems the human race wasn’t even aware of yet. 

And it wasn’t like she could even find her soulmate. He was in the wind. There was nothing she could do. Right? 

Of course that changed when she and Jane were taken under Stark’s wing as the Avengers b-team. They didn’t do any of the fighting, working in a support capacity and fiddling with fully-funded astrophysics to their heart's content, but it suited them both just fine. 

Now that she was working with and technically  _ for _ Stark, she felt obligated to inform him of the fact that she had a soulmate and well...he happened to be the man that orphaned her new boss. 

Stark took it surprisingly well, sitting quietly and staring at her. He didn’t quite believe her at first, but Jane was there to back her up, along with a printed version of the comparative timelines they’d mapped two years ago. His eyes had widened and an emergency Avengers meeting had been called. 

***

She feels like a bug under glass as the room full of superheroes stares her down. Captain Rogers pins her down with the hardest stare, something like hope and suspicion mingling together behind his eyes. 

“We know where he is.” 

Steve’s rumbling voice startles her. The phrase is uttered like he is giving her a gift, a lifeline, but it is one that she does not wish to grasp. 

“Miss Lewis? Did you hear me?” 

“Yes.” Her answer is curt, bordering on impolite, but she can feel him pressuring her towards a destination that she emphatically  _ does not want to go. _

“Steve.” The Widow’s voice is soft, but deceptively so, like velvet covered steel. Her tone holds a warning. 

“No, Natasha! We’ve known where he’s been for nearly  _ two years _ and you’ve been adamant that we let him be, let him have a chance to put himself back together without our interference.” He is standing up from the conference table, his broad shoulders casting a shadow, his hair a blonde halo. An avenging angel. He looks exactly like she’d imagine an avenging angel to look like. One of his big hands flings in Darcy’s direction. She flinches, not because she thinks he’s about to hit her, but because she knows where the conversation is heading. 

“We have his  _ soulmate,  _ Nat. If this isn’t a sign from the goddamn universe that it’s time to bring him in, then I don’t know what is!” He’s breathing hard, his cheeks flushed pink. He’s pretty, she thinks, even if he is trying to tear her world apart. 

She feels small, even with the attention now turned to Captain Roger’s dramatic outburst. She fights the urge to fold in on herself, squaring her shoulders and clearing her throat. 

“Excuse me.” It’s not very loud, but the room is still quiet enough that everyone hears it. They all turn to look at her, but it’s Steve's attention that she feels the most. 

“He’s not ready. To come back.” She pinches her lips closed, waiting for the inevitable backlash of her words. 

Steve’s face twists in anger. “How can  _ you  _ of all people say that? You’re supposed to be his soulmate! Don’t you want him?” 

Darcy closes her eyes, the guilt that his words inspire punches her in the gut because  _ no, she doesn’t want him. _ She used to, she wanted to meet him and be with him  _ so badly _ before she knew who he was. She couldn’t say that to Steve though. She’d likely end up with a  _ literal  _ punch to the gut, or something. 

“Of course I want him,” she says. She  _ lies.  _ “But he’s not ready yet.” Which is true. It’s not the reason she doesn’t want to find him, but it is true enough in its own right. 

“How would you know? You don’t even want to meet him.” Derision, anger, they drip from his tongue, landing like acid on the table between them. 

And now she’s  _ angry,  _ the feeling taking hold over all the other slippery emotions she’d been cycling through since meeting with Tony that morning. 

“I  _ know,”  _ she growls, “because he’s in my head!” She lets that sink in. Most people are unaware of the different symptoms of a soulbond, their rarity making them out as mostly myth. It shows that most of the room is no different, their faces registering varying degrees of shock and horror. Except for Bruce, oddly enough. He gives her the strangest glimpse of sympathetic eyes before the look fades to something polite but distant. 

“What do you mean?” Steve asks, his voice quavering but much quieter now. 

Darcy sighs. These things are not something that’s usually shared with others, the details of how a soulbond manifests itself is considered a private thing, sacred even, after a certain age. She can tell that Steve cares not one whit for propriety, at least not in this moment. 

“His memories are coming back, I think. The things they wiped, they’re coming back to him and it is fucking him up something fierce. Every time it feels like his mind starts to ease, to stop feeling so...scattered, he’ll have a dream, usually one I have to witness as well, and it will be a memory and it just….god, it  _ wrecks _ him.” 

“And that doesn’t...that doesn’t make you want to find him?” Steve asks in disbelief. They could be the only people in the room, the intensity of their stand-off obliterating the others from their consciousness. 

Darcy narrows her eyes. “When I dream, I dream of my hands, covered in blood, gutting men. I dream of staring down the scope of a rifle, watching as my bullet sings through the air, until a woman’s brain matter is spewed across the grass. I have dreamt of snapping the neck of a  _ child,  _ Captain Rogers. If you would fucking  _ excuse me,  _ but I think it only makes me human that I’m not exactly gung-ho to go after  _ that!”  _

She slaps her hands down on the conference table as she stands, kicking her chair out of the way and stomping off to the elevators. She steps in and Jarvis seems to know that she intends to go to her apartment without asking, the button for her floor lighting up automatically as soon as the doors close behind her. She just might have gotten herself fired and possibly evicted so she is going to go soak in her giant tub and get rip-roaring drunk for the rest of the day. Never mind that it is only 10:45 in the morning. 

After her exit, Natasha grips Steve by the wrist. He looks rather cowed by Darcy’s eruption. She would have been pleased to see it, if she’d still been in the room. 

“Let her go, Steve,” Natasha says quietly, a murmur really, but his ears pick it up immediately. “He isn’t ready, and neither is she. Let them go.” 

He slumps back down into his chair, the image of defeat. 

Darcy isn’t there to hear it, but Jane relays Steve and Natasha’s conversation later, along with assurances that she will not be thrown out on the streets. Darcy sinks lower in her tub, luxuriating in the fact that this won’t be her last bath in the gorgeous thing and relieved that Steve won’t be pressuring her to seek out her soulmate. She must be a bit more drunk than she estimates as her head slips momentarily below the surface of the water. Bony hands grip her under the armpits and haul her to the surface with surprising strength. 

“Alright, Darce. No more wine for you. Or baths,” Jane grunts in her ear as she bails her out of the tub. It is not a very graceful endeavor but they somehow get the job done. Darcy finds herself, still mildly damp, but safely tucked in her bed. 

“Get some rest Darcy. You don’t have to come back to the labs until tomorrow.” Jane gives her a long look. “Afternoon. Don’t come back until tomorrow afternoon.”

Darcy slurs a response but even she isn't sure what she’s saying at this point. 


	2. Cracked and Cared For

The gods or the fates or the Norns or whatever  _ things  _ are out there pulling all the fucking strings, give Darcy six months more of peace before deciding to shatter the little world she’s so carefully constructed around her. 

They decide to crush her heart, quite literally.

She is in the labs, per usual, assisting Jane and Dr. Banner with a project that fuses their two specialties in a way that honestly makes Darcy’s head spin. One moment she is taking careful procedural notes and the next she’s on her knees, struggling to breath around the myriad of pains in her chest. 

The pain isn’t hers though. Somewhere in the world, Bucky Barnes has been hurt. Again. It’s been such a long time since she’s felt pain like this from him. The pain spreads and deepens and then releases her as suddenly as it came. Her impressions from him never lasted long in the past, and she is thankful the trend is holding. She stands with the help of Dr.’s Banner and Foster on either side of her, matching expressions of concern etched on their faces. 

“It’s nothing,” she assures them. “It’s not...it’s not me.  _ He’s _ hurt. Not me.” The concern deepens so she hastens to add, “He’ll be fine. He’s survived worse.” And she knows for a fact that he has, she didn’t need to read his file to know that. She has felt worse pain before from him than this. 

But this was not the moment when it all came crashing down around her. No, that would come the next day. 

She is again at her note-taking post, a lull in the proceedings giving her a moment to contemplate where she might like to go for lunch. She never gets to decide whether she’ll be heading for greasy diner food or to her favorite deli, as her musings are swiftly cut off by a major heart attack. 

That’s what it feels like anyway. For the second time in as many days, she finds herself on her knees on the lab floor, finding it hard to force air into her lungs. This time feels different than the day prior, all the pain is centered over her heart. It feels as though the organ is being squeezed by one of Thor’s meaty fists. 

Dr. Banner is at her side in an instant, asking what’s wrong, what he can do. 

“I think,” she gasps out, “I think he’s having a heart attack!” Bruce’s grip on her shoulder tightens, enough to draw her attention from the pain in her chest. The look on his face, the pale horror, is what finally makes things click in her head, just as Jane rounds the corner to see her huddled on the floor next to Bruce. Jane rushes to her, kneeling in front of Darcy. 

_ “Oh my god,”  _ Darcy cries, “Janey, he’s dying!” 

Jane’s eyes widen and then she’s shouting at the ceiling.

“Jarvis! Alert Tony and Captain Rogers!”

“Right away, Dr. Foster,” the A.I. responds with inhuman calm. 

As she adjusts to the pain, Darcy’s mind is able to really let the reality of the situation sink in and completely devastate her. 

This aspect of the soulbond was a thing of legend, even more so than the actual bond itself. It is said that when one half of a bond is dying, through grave injury or disease, the other half will feel it, no matter the distance between the two, in what is called the  _ heartsong. _ This certainly did not  _ feel _ like her heart was singing but it fit the description she’d read in most soulbond textbooks. It was an alert to danger and, should the two come back into physical contact with each other in time, it would stymie whatever ailed the dying by transferring...life, energy, strength,  _ something _ from the healthy. Sometimes it gave the bonded pair enough to time to save the dying mate. Sometimes it didn’t.  

It was an oddity, the entire thing, soulmates, heartsongs, all of it. It seemed to defy logic, to spit in the face of modern science. The best that scientists could seem to theorize with the whole thing was that it was some odd fluke of evolution, especially since it was so much more common even five hundred years ago, before modern medicine and hygiene. The running theory was that soulmates made better partners and parents, which led to healthier offspring, which led to healthier, more stable generations. However, with the multitude of technological and philosophical advances of the world, over time soulmates became less pertinent to the survival of the species.

As for the legendary heartsong, the focal point of many a romantic play and novel and Hallmark movie, scientists wrote it down as evolution's way of giving a last ditch effort to keep a perfect pairing alive, giving them a chance to carry on their genetic strains. They chalked it up to being similar in nature to the way that unborn babies will send stem cells to repair organ damage in their mothers. A strange, yet beautiful quirk of biology. 

This certainly feels strange to Darcy, though she fails to see the beauty of it quite yet. She is too blinded by terror at the thought that she is losing him, and she’d never had the decency to even try to go to him. She hates what’s happening to her, to her world. It’s almost a relief when Steve strides into the lab, that determined purpose of his thundering with each snap of his heels against the tile floor. 

He scoops her up, like she’s nothing, like she weighs as much as a blade of grass, and marches out of the lab. Jane and Bruce follow but Darcy thinks they must be interceded shortly thereafter by Natasha, if the flash of red hair she briefly sees is any indication.

Steve carries her to the elevator which takes them to the floor where the quinjet is parked. Tony is already shouting out last minute directions to various minions while Pepper stands to the side, watching Tony with unease. Darcy doesn’t see much more than that before Steve’s beefy shoulder blocks the others from view. He marches up the ramp of the quinjet with her, placing her in an empty seat. He squeezes her hand but doesn’t say anything. She thinks he might be clenching his jaw so tight that speech has become impossible. 

He leaves her there, and she loses track of her surroundings for a short while, until the vibration of the quinjet taking off wakes her from her pained stupor. There’s only four of them on the jet; her, Steve, Tony, and Natasha who is busy piloting. 

“Where are we going?” she croaks out. 

“To save him,” Steve replies, at the same time that Tony says, “Bucharest.” 

“Okay,” is all she says in reply. She is flooded with relief. Relief and then  _ fear.  _ What if they are too late? What if he is already dead when they get there and she will have to live the rest of her life knowing she left her soulmate out in the cold because she was too much of a  _ coward _ to go after him? She hates herself right now, hates herself more than she’s ever hated anyone in her life. 

The flight lasts an eternity. 

She listens to Steve and Nat bicker about the accuracy of her intel on Barnes’ exact location as they begin to land. Darcy can’t quite follow the conversation. She’s too busy counting her heartbeats. As long as the beating of her heart pains her, she knows he’s still alive. She’s never been so thankful for the pain he shares with her. 

Some distant, alert part of her mind registers when Steve lifts her into his arms again. She’s shuffled into the backseat of a car. The red head disappears and Darcy can only assume she is staying with the jet as support. Steve is arguing into the piece of plastic and tech in his ear. He seems to think that Bucky is being kept somewhere else than Nat’s intel relays, somewhere that is preventing the serum from doing its job. 

Darcy knows Natasha is right the minute Steve lifts her out of the car in front of a dingy apartment building in the slums of Budapest. She can feel him inside the building, somewhere, dying. Her heart stutters and squeezes harder. 

_ “Steve,”  _ she coughs. Begs. 

Her soulmate is like gravity; the pull ancient, the fall inevitable. He’s so very  _ close  _ now, the small distance left is going to kill her, she thinks, unless the gap is closed  _ immediately.  _

She thanks the gods when Steve’s booted feet trudge up the steps of the building. 

Closer. 

Closer. 

Tony quickly and efficiently blasts the door off its hinges and she can  _ breathe _ again.  

The men hesitate at the threshold and she wants to  _ scream  _ at them. Instead she pats at Steve’s shoulder, quietly asks him to set her on her feet. He acquiesces without argument. When she requests that the men stay at the door, she can see that the Captain wants to fight her on it, but ultimately he gives her a curt nod and leans stiffly into the door jamb. 

She huffs a sigh of relief and walks from the door to the little island that separates the kitchen from the rest of the shoebox apartment. Her hands clasp the edge of the weathered linoleum countertop. That’s when she gets her first glimpse of him, her soulmate. 

He lays on top of a sad little mattress on the floor, his blood soaking and drying into the already stained fabric. She can see several holes in his chest, oozing blood, and trickles of it seep from the corners of his mouth. 

She gasps and loses her feet, hitting her knees hard. She flings a hand back, palm up to keep Rogers at bay, to assure him that she can do this. She  _ has  _ to do this. 

She can’t walk anymore, the pain in her chest is too great, but by god she will crawl to him if she cannot walk. She struggles forward on hands and knees, the closer she gets, the easier she can hear his shallow breathing. He takes in air in harsh little gasps that gurgle wetly in his chest on the exhale. 

She’s crying, and it surprises her. She doesn’t know when that started. 

The floor creaks beneath her hands and knees. In the next moment his lids snap open, his head twitching to the side to pin her with the blue-grey of his eyes. She’s never seen anything so beautiful. It hurts worse than the pain in her heart. 

_ “Bucky,”  _ she says. Really, she sobs it out more than anything, her throat warbling and warping the sound of his name to nigh incoherence. Still. He hears what he needs to hear. His eyes widen in surprise. 

“You’re real?” he asks, amazed. 

“Yeah,” she whispers, shame burning through her. He’d spent these years thinking he was alone and that she was just another delusion in his head and under his skin. She sinks back onto her heels, clutching her aching chest with both hands. He’s not five feet from her and she wants to be closer but she feels frozen in her self-hatred. 

“What happened?” she asks.

“Got shot.” He chokes slightly after the words. The gurgling increases. 

A half-mad huff of laughter falls from her mouth. “I can see that. Why aren’t you  _ healing?”  _

He weakly lifts a hand, more a twitch than actual gesture towards his chest. “Bullets in the...way.” More gasping. He’s struggling. 

_ “Why,  _ Bucky, why haven’t you pulled them out? We both know you’ve done it before.” She shouldn’t sound so accusatory. She knows this. She has no right to be, but she’s only human. 

He sighs, breaks his gaze from hers. He turns deadened eyes towards the ceiling. “Didn’t feel like it.” He sounds resigned and tired, so very tired. 

This breaks her apart and she sobs in earnest. She crawls closer to him, reaches a hand towards him. 

“Bucky,  _ please Bucky,  _ baby, I need you alive. Please.” She’s begging in broken sobs, and god she will keep begging until he responds, her dignity be damned. He ignores her pleas, so she pulls out the big guns. “Please, baby, you’re  _ hurting me.”  _

That gets his attention, his eyes back on hers in an instant. There’s no sound but the gurgle of his labored breathing and then his eyes slide shut and he gives the barest nod of his head. His fingers twitch and she takes it for invitation, crawling forward to curl around him on the mattress. She loosens a relieved breath against the side of his face, her hand coming up to cup the other side. Immediately the ache of her heart eases and his breathing loses some of its death rattle. Her eyes flash to Steve by the door but he’s already closing in, a med bag in his hand. She closes her eyes and sinks into unconsciousness. She knows in her bones that Bucky follows her down. 


	3. No Man is an Island

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in my haste to post the last few chapters of my last few fics, I've been a complete doofus and forgotten to credit and thank my wonderful beta, ladyaudiophile, which is unacceptable because that sweet woman spends HOURS sorting through the words that I pull out of my butt and then through some kind of magic turns my asswords into something that humans can actually read. Bless her sweet, patient soul, all my thanks and love to her!
> 
> Not a lot happens in this chapter but sometimes you gotta have a little heart to heart with your characters, ya know?

Darcy wakes slowly, her mind rising to the surface out of the murky waters of sleep. She is disoriented, confusion clinging to her as awareness seeps into her consciousness while recent memory stays inconveniently buried somewhere in the back of her mind. Until the firm chest resting under her hand gives a slow rise and fall and then memory comes screaming forward at her with startling clarity. 

She tenses and then commands her muscles to relax so as not to disturb the stranger that she is coiled around like an ill fitted jacket. Her head is pillowed on his shoulder, which is now bare. His shirt has been removed since she passed out. Sort of. 

It’s been cut down the center, the tattered remains pushed to the side to allow for Steve to dig around in Bucky’s chest and pull out the bullets. The thought makes her stomach roll, or perhaps that’s just the first pangs of hunger. She wonders how long she’s been out. Several hours, at least. When they’d arrived, it had been in the weak early light of morning. It is fully dark now, even more so with the windows all covered with newspapers. 

The soft rustle of a page turning catches her attention and her eyes snap over to the kitchen island. Steve sits there on a bar stool, back hunched over and his nose inches from a notebook. She has no idea how he can see to read in such darkness, the only light coming from a streetlamp shining through a slim gap in the newspaper. It makes her eyes cross just thinking about it. Of course, she is nearsighted and doesn’t have the benefits of superserum to boost her eyesight, so perhaps it’s not all that irritating to him. 

She’s fully awake now, uncomfortably so, as she is now very aware that she’s in bed with a man she doesn’t know, with a crick in her neck, and covered in a staggering amount of mostly dried blood. She grimaces at the thought, and then as quietly and carefully as she can, rises from the mattress and away from its other occupant. From this angle she can see his chest and belly is covered in bandages, concealing at least eight bullet holes by her count. The rest of his pale torso is mottled with the traces of hastily sopped up blood and wide swaths of the orange-brown of iodine. His breathing is steady, blue eyes darting behind closed lids. Those beautiful, blue eyes. 

She blinks and turns away from that line of thought, both literally and figuratively. She treads on leaden limbs over to where Steve is sitting, wincing at the feeling of Bucky’s blood cracking and flaking off of her skin. However, that sensation isn’t nearly so bad as the stickiness of it where the blood is still wet and making her clothes cling to her in unfortunate places. She vows never to complain about underboob sweat ever again. 

Steve finally notices her presence, jerking upright to sit with a ramrod straight spine, snapping the book he’d been holding shut with one hand. He seems surprised at her appearance, and Darcy realizes he must have been concentrating incredibly hard on the notebook for her to be able to sneak up on him like that. She is no Black Widow. Even at her stealthiest, she lumbers around enough to alert even unpowered humans. 

She gives an awkward little wave of her fingers, face screwed up in an apologetic smile. “Hey,” she says, then coughs to clear the roughness of her throat. “What time is it?”

Steve glances at the watch on his wrist. “Little after two.”

Darcy goes to scrub her hands over her face, but stops when she notices the blood on them. She sighs, letting her hands drop to rest on her hips. “No wonder I feel hungover. Nothing like a nineteen hour power nap to really knock you on your ass.”

Steve gives a halfhearted smile. “That and having to keep your soulmate from dying while he’s bleeding out.” The smile grows cold, sad, then settles into a flat line. “I tried to wake you earlier, but you wouldn’t stir. I called Banner, but he says it’s normal. That you’d sleep for a long while and then need to eat, rehydrate, and then you’d be peachy keen.”

“Peachy keen?” Darcy asks flatly, her brow ticked up at one corner. “Those were his words?”

A little spark comes back to Steve’s eyes, the beginning of a smirk flitting around the corners of his mouth. “Mhm. It’s a technical term.” 

She hums and then excuses herself to use the bathroom, her full bladder becoming her most pressing need. She skirts around the edge of Bucky’s bed, keeps her eyes on the open doorway of the tiny bathroom. She scoots inside, closing the door softly behind her before flicking on the light. The sight that meets her in the mirror is...gruesome. She looks like she’s gone ten rounds with a grizzly bear after three weeks of no sleep….and then been electrocuted. She squeezes her eyes shut tight until geometric patterns of light and darkness flash behind her eyelids, then draws a slow, deep breath. She releases it and relaxes the lingering tension in her body, letting her eyes flutter open. 

She makes quick work of emptying her bladder and washes her hands in the sink, scrubbing at them furiously until her skin is clean and pink from elbow to fingertip. She runs her damp fingers through her hair and tries her best to calm its curly wrath. She gives up halfway through and throws it up into a haphazard bun after finding a little collection of hair ties in the medicine cabinet. Who’d have thought her soulmate would be rocking the hipster manbun? She chuckles quietly to herself, actively ignoring the manic edge to her laughter. 

Steve is reading again when she exits the bathroom. Again, he startles when she approaches him, closing the book quickly with a decidedly guilty gleam to his eyes. Darcy narrows hers and flicks them down to the book in his hand and back to his gaze. 

“What’s up, Cap? You reading porn to pass the time?’

Even in the dim light she can see the dark flush of his cheeks and she bites the inside of lips to keep from laughing. 

“It’s not porn,” he grunts. 

He shifts in his seat a bit and it makes her wonder all the more what it is he’s reading. He glances between her and the book a few times before handing it over to her without looking her in the eye. She accepts it from him, her brows high on her forehead. She cracks open the notebook, squinting hard to decipher what’s on the pages. It only takes her a few lines to realize what it is and she jerks her attention up to Steve. 

“I know,” he says, hands raised in a placating gesture. “I know I shouldn’t be reading his personal stuff but…” his hands drop and his shoulders hunch in, elbows coming to rest on his knees, his gaze landing somewhere near his toes. “Just wanted to know if he remembers me,” he whispers. 

Darcy aches for the guy. Steve Rogers has been dealt a pretty shitty hand by the universe. She steps closer to him, her knees and toes edging into his line of sight. 

“Does he?” she asks. 

Steve shrugs one shoulder and then reaches out to the book that still lays open in her hands. He flicks through a few pages until it opens on a picture of Steve’s face in his Cap cowl, obviously cut from a magazine and pasted to the page. 

“Maybe,” he mumbles. “He knows who I am, at least. Knows what...knows what he meant to me.” He looks up at her with the saddest eyes. It’s the most vulnerable that she’s ever seen the man, and the guilt that’s been idling at the back of her head since she woke flares to life with a vengeance. 

“Hey, hey,” she murmurs, setting the notebook down and edging in close enough to rest a hand on his shoulder. “If he doesn’t know you now, he will eventually.”

“You think so?” There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes and she wants nothing more than to breathe life into it. 

“I’ve been inside his head, remember?” She taps at her temple with her free hand. “He’s been getting memories back for a while now, who’s to say that some of those memories aren’t about you?”

Steve nods and a smile twists up one side of his mouth. He drops his gaze to somewhere near her navel and she can practically see the cogs turning inside his head. He glances back up at her, a tentative look on his face. 

“I know that it’s not...appropriate for me to ask this but…” he hesitates. 

“You wanna know what he’s been thinking? Details, presumably?” she guesses before he can finish his thought. 

Steve nods sheepishly. “I understand if you don’t wanna answer, I know that sort of thing is supposed to be, um, private.” 

Darcy sighs, rubbing the heel of her palm into the headache that’s starting to build behind her eyes. “Lemme get something to eat and some water first. I’ll tell you what I know once my head stops pounding, kay?”

Steve nods eagerly, leaping up from his chair to hastily rummage through Bucky’s cabinets and fridge. She takes his place in the chair he’s just vacated. It looks like someone has done a grocery run while she slept and Darcy is thankful for it when Steve plunks a huge sandwich in front of her, piled high with alternating layers of turkey, cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes. Seconds later a large glass of water is slid in front of her and she takes several gulps before digging into her sandwich.

Between bites, she peppers him with the questions that have been niggling at the back of her brain since waking.

“Where’s Tony?”

“Took off once Buck was stable. He’s still dealing with finding out about his parents. He doesn’t blame Bucky… but he’s not exactly ready to be friends with him, either.”

Darcy nods, chewing thoughtfully. “Any idea how he got all shot up? Hydra run-in?”

“Thankfully, no. From what Nat has been able to gather, Buck stepped in when the older lady that lives across the hall was in the middle of being beaten and robbed. Took some lead to the chest for his efforts but he, uh, eliminated the perps. Got the lady to the hospital and then ghosted before the docs could get their hands on him.”

Darcy’s chewing slows and she swallows hard. “And then came back here and decided to take a permanent nap,” she says, bitterness and self-hatred seeping into the words. She sets the last of her sandwich back down on her plate, her hunger sated and her stomach now too in knots to eat anymore. 

Steve slumps heavily to rest his forearms on the counter beside her, his breath leaving his lungs with a suspiciously shaky sigh. His face is turned away from her. She reaches out to grip his bicep.

“Captain Rogers?” she asks gently. There’s a fine tremor running through him and she knows he’s repressing some shit that really shouldn’t be repressed. She tugs more firmly on the bicep in her hand, rising from her chair to stand beside him. 

He sniffs and then finally turns his face back towards her. “Sorry,” he says thickly, then drops his shimmering gaze to the cracked linoleum counter. “He’s the only family I have left,” he whispers in explanation, one shoulder rising in a shrug. 

Darcy sighs and clicks her tongue in dismay, then lifts her hand from its grip around his arm to soothe over his shoulders. “Aw, don’t apologize, man. Come here.” 

She wraps both hands around his bicep this time and pulls. He looks at her in confusion but straightens to standing at her urging. “You’re getting emergency hug privileges,” she mumbles and then wraps her arms around his waist, closing in on him to press the side of her face to the center of his chest. She pats his back lightly, waiting for the awkward stiffness to drain out of him. 

When it finally does, he crumbles around her and she’s suddenly bearing up quite a bit of supersoldier weight. He folds himself around her and sobs in earnest, though quietly, his hot tears falling to run the length of her neck and dampen the neckline of her sweater. She patiently waits out the tempest of his emotions, rubbing her palms in little circles into the knotted muscle between his shoulder blades. She wonders when was the last time he let himself be this vulnerable with another person present. Or even just by himself. He seems the type to carry the world on his shoulders while adhering to a strict policy of suppressing his emotions. 

When she is about two seconds from collapsing under his weight, he finally calms and straightens. His arms unwrap from her shoulders so he can run his hands over his face, scrubbing the tears from his cheeks. She steps back, giving him some space to pull himself together. He starts to say something but she cuts him off. 

“If you’re about to apologize, don’t. There’s no reason to,” she states firmly. 

He rubs his palms over his arms, not quite meeting her gaze. “Thanks,” he says, voice still thick with his recently shed tears. 

Darcy hums in acknowledgement of his thanks but doesn’t comment further. She sidles away from him, a certain awkwardness settling between them. She hops back onto her seat from earlier and picks the remainder of her sandwich apart.

“So, did you have some, uh, some questions for me? About my- the bond?” She glances up at him and he looks significantly more put together than she would have if she’d just bawled her eyes out. Utterly unfair. 

He clears his throat. “Uh, yeah. Just...just what is he like now? What’s he thinking? Stuff like that.” He scratches behind one ear and shrugs. 

“Um, well, first of all, I can’t like... _ read  _ his mind. It’s not like listening in on his thoughts. I’m not streaming his inner monologue. And I can’t control when it happens or for how long.” 

Steve nods pensively at this, leans his hip against the counter, and folds his arms over his chest. “So what is it like, then?”

Darcy bobs her head side to side, trying to parse out how to explain a sensation she barely understands herself. “It’s like...it’s like,” she pauses, licks her lips. “When we’re linked, it’s like listening to him through a...a membrane. I can’t so much  _ hear _ his thoughts as I can sorta  _ feel  _ them. Like our minds are being pressed together along that membrane and I can perceive the nature of his mind, the emotion behind his thoughts. And sometimes I get linked up to external sensations along with the press of his mind.” Her hands flutter helplessly in the air. “Like when he gets shot or breaks bones, sometimes I’ll feel that. Or sometimes I’ll smell and taste things that aren’t there, things that he’s experiencing at that moment.” 

She flushes as her mind stumbles over some of the sensations she’s received with more and more frequency in the past year. Decidedly more  _ pleasurable _ experiences, but she isn’t about to tell  _ Captain America _ that his buddy has been fucking his way through Eastern Europe for the last ten months. She swallows hard and tries not to think about it. 

“And sometimes I’ll tune into whatever he’s dreaming about, but that’s rarer because we both have to be asleep at the same time and half the time I don’t remember them when I wake up.” She shrugs.  “Does that make sense?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does.” He looks disappointed, like he was expecting more.

“Look, I don’t get anything concrete, but I get enough to know that beneath all the crap that Hydra put in him, made him do, he’s still...he’s still the guy that you used to know. It’s buried under a lot of shit, but he’s in there. I think his getting shot for rescuing an old lady is pretty good evidence of that.” 

Steve’s smile is heartbreakingly bright. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

Steve’s gaze wanders to where Bucky is still out cold on his mattress. “I just want him back,” he murmurs. 

“And you’ll get him back. Someday.” She worries that she’s given Steve the wrong idea so she hastens to clarify. “At least...you’ll get back the important parts. The parts that make up who he is at his core. Some of the more, um, superficial aspects of his personality might be gone, maybe permanently. But the parts that really matter are still there and will make themselves known. In time. I’m sure of it.” She says it with more cheer than she feels, because she understands the road to that destination will be a long and rough one, but she thinks that Steve deserves a little cheer. 

He smiles at her, “It’ll be good to have him close by. In the interim.”

Darcy clears her throat. “Steve…” she says slowly. 

His face morphs from content to disbelief in a flash. “Are you kidding me? After everything...everything you’ve just told me, after meeting him, after he almost  _ died,  _ you still don’t want to be with him?” His voice rises sharply and Darcy glances at Bucky, making sure he’s still undisturbed. 

She shushes Steve and he glares at her, indignant, but she ignores that. “Steve, keep your voice down,” she mumbles. 

“Why?” he asks sharply, though at a lower volume. “So he won’t wake up to hear that he’s been abandoned by the one person in this world who isn’t supposed to betray him?”

“No, you asshat,” she hisses back. “The fact that he’s not ready to be brought into the fold hasn’t changed. His mind is still a heaping hot mess. If you bring him in now, he’s going to feel  _ trapped.  _ Controlled. And that is the absolute last thing he needs while he’s still recovering. He needs to feel like he can run at any moment, that he can disappear if he needs to. Living with the Avengers in the tower in the middle of New York City is not gonna give him that sense of security. It might make  _ you  _ feel better to have him there, but he’ll feel like he’s in goddamn glass cage!” 

Steve just gapes at her. “But-but,” he stammers. “We can’t just  _ leave _ him here. Not again.”

She rolls her eyes and hops off her stool, gripping him by the shoulders and popping up on her toes to meet his eyes. “We’re not. I’m staying with him.” 

That shocks him and he blinks owlishly at her. “Oh.” 

She sinks back down onto her heels, drops her hands to twist together in front of her belly. Shame wells up and chokes her. “I won’t...I can’t leave him,” she whispers. “Not now.” She looks up at Steve, and is mortified that tears are slowly filling the corners of her eyes, but there's not much she can do about it. 

“I should have gone to him, should have come here the moment you told me where he was...but,” she sniffles and rubs at her nose. “God, I was such a fucking  _ coward,  _ so fucking  _ selfish  _ and I hate myself for it.” The tears finally spill over the edge of her lids, slipping silently down her cheeks. “I was scared of him, that I wouldn’t be able to handle being tied to him... but that doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t leave him. I’m still so fucking scared but when he  _ looked at me _ ….God, Steve it was like everything slotted into place for the first time in my life and I can’t-I can’t-” 

Arms come down to wrap her up tight as Steve shushes her, his breath shifting the hair at the top of her head. She is sobbing openly now and she is glad to have the wretched sounds muffled by Steve’s beefy chest. Perhaps all those muscles were good for something, after all. Well, besides saving the world every other day. 

He is a decent guy, she decides, despite the volatile start to their relationship. He rocks her gently from side to side, as diligent and patient in soothing her as she had been to him earlier, slotting himself firmly into the “New Friend” category in Darcy’s mind. 

The scuff of boots on carpeting has them both straightening from their embrace, eyes flitting to where a now conscious Bucky Barnes is standing and staring at them. 

Steve releases her and reaches slowly for his oldest friend. “Bucky?”

Bucky’s eyes flick to the hand outstretched towards him and he eases back a step, his eyes growing shuttered with suspicion. Darcy, sensing that he’s about to bolt, licks her lips and steps in front of Steve. 

“Bucky,” she breathes out, voice tight. His eyes flick away from Steve to her at the sound of her voice and he grows even more tense, but he doesn’t run. She counts that as a win.  

“Bucky, I’m-I’m Darcy...your soulmate.” 

His eyes widen and he sways back on his heels slightly. In the next instant, his entire demeanor changes. He sinks into a defensive posture and his eyes grow cold and haunted. 

“I don’t have a soul,” he says lowly, his lips barely moving. Then, in an explosion of energy she is only barely capable of following, he turns on his heel and runs. Steve darts around from behind her to follow him, but Bucky leaps through a window, sending glass shattering to the kitchen floor. Darcy rushes to follow Steve. They both catch the last glance of Bucky rolling to his feet on the concrete balcony outside the window before he leaps off the ledge.  

Steve puts his fist through the wall, breathing hard and nostrils flaring like a pissed off bull. 

Darcy’s hands shake as she stares at the spot where she’s just seen her soulmate disappear. 

“Well,” she says quietly. “Fuck.” 


	4. Counting Bodies Like Sheep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to my beta Ladyaudiophile!
> 
> EDIT: THE FIRST HALF OF THIS WAS CUT OFF I'M SO SORRY IT IS FIXED NOW

“I think you should leave.”

“Excuse me?” Steve looks up from the jigsaw puzzle he and Natasha are working on. Entertainment has been hard to come by in the days following Barnes’ disappearance. 

Darcy chews at her bottom lip, bracing herself for the firestorm she was likely walking into. “I think you guys need to leave. We know he hasn’t left the area but he isn’t exactly waltzing into our hotel suite looking to make nice. I think he is...curious. About me. But I also think that you three make him feel threatened and as long as you’re in town, he’s going to keep his distance.” She winces and waits Steve out as he takes a breath. He opens his mouth and then promptly closes it, his eyes dropping to the puzzle again. 

Silence reigns for several seconds and the only person moving is Steve, who is meticulously straightening puzzle pieces. Nat sits across from him watching the entire exchange with a neutral expression. Tony watches with far less ambivalent look, obviously waiting for the shitshow to begin. 

Steve surprises everyone, even Natasha, when he raises his head to meet Darcy’s gaze. “I think you’re right,” he says with a sigh. 

“Excuse me?” Darcy replies, echoing Steve’s earlier response. 

Tony coughs and says to no one in particular, “Did anyone record that? I’m gonna need that on a plaque.” 

Steve rolls his eyes but other than that ignores Tony. “All our intel shows him staying in the city limits. It’s out of character for him, doesn’t follow his previous patterns, so something’s gotta be keeping him here. I can only assume that it’s because of you.” 

Darcy, wide-eyed and still slightly shocked, just nods.

Steve’s expression hardens after a moment. “I won’t just leave you here, though. Not without resources.” 

Something about the reappearance of Commanding Cap snaps Darcy from her shock. “Yeah, yeah, cool, cool, cool. What resources?”

Nat steps in. “Weapons, cash, cards, burner phones, documentation-both authentic and forged- transportation, physical necessities like clothing and toiletries-”

“Hold up. How much cash are we talking?”

“At least three grand,” Tony supplies. “And access to bank accounts that hold more money than you could ever hope to spend.”

“Jesus. Why would I even need that kind of money?”

“Because,” Tony replies, leaving the spot where is casually leaning against a tastefully beige wall of their ridiculously expensive hotel suite. “I want to know that at any moment, for any reason, if you should change your mind about staying behind...about Barnes, I want to know that you have the funds to get to the nearest airport and back home.”

Darcy can’t help but stare at her boss. She doesn’t know the man very well, but there’s a tenderness inside him that she can see is seeping out from between the cracks in his sarcastic and sometimes callous demeanor. She swallows dryly. “Alright.” She turns her attention back to Natasha. “Nat, you know the extent of my weapons training…” she trails off, uneasy.

Nat smirks and nods. “Yes I do. Which is why your weapons stash will include a nonstandard, highly modified taser, courtesy of Stark Industries.”

Darcy closes her eyes and gives a stunted fist pump. “Sick.”

Nat’s grin grows wider, with a hint of teeth gleaming between her scarlet lips. “If you’re a good girl and give us 48 hours to collect all of your resources _and_ can remain patient while we do so, I’ll even give you a few of my Widow’s bites.”

Darcy grins and clicks her teeth with her tongue. “If only that was a euphemism.”

Steve makes a strange, choked sound, much to Darcy’s amusement. “Alright, 48 hours and then I want you guys back on the quinjet and headed for the States,” she says with finality, her eyes darting to each of the Avengers trio.

Three heads nod in agreement with her.

***

Later that night she finds herself standing alone on the penthouse balcony, looking out over the city of Bucharest. This part of the city is beautiful, glowing with nightlife and classical architecture. A far different view than from the balcony her soulmate disappeared from. There is a sigh from behind her and then Steve appears at her side. She leans into his warmth, the night air having gone chilly hours ago.

“I keep going back and forth about whether or not I should let you do this alone.” His voice is a soft rumble, anxiety sharpening the edges.

“Well, for one, I don’t answer to you so you’re not _letting me_ do anything. I chose this for myself. And secondly, I won’t be alone. Technically.”

“ _If_ he actually contacts you.”

“And if he doesn’t, I’ll just get my ass on the first flight back to New York with a possible detour to Milan while I’ve still got access to Stark’s money.” She says this with more bravado than she actually feels.

Steve snorts. “Poor Tony. His accounts will never be the same.”

Darcy grins and bumps her shoulder into his arm. They stay quiet for a long time, both of them lost to their own thoughts. Darcy rests her head on Steve’s shoulder. She understands now why Nat likes him so much. Her first impression of Steve hadn’t been the best, and she found him to be overly aggressive, an immovable force of nature. She knows the truth now. Yes, he is still capable of aggression --he _is_ a soldier, after all-- but he fights for what he believes is good, and true, and right. Others have fought wars for far less noble reasons. And yes, he is still an immovable force, but she knows his stubbornness also translates to steadiness. He is grounding in his steadfast nature. She finds comfort in this. Perhaps part of being Bucky Barnes’ soulmate means loving Steve Rogers. It’s only been a few days, but the man already feels like family to her.

“What am I gonna tell your family?” he asks, breaking the comfortable silence.

Darcy sighs. She’s thought about that as well, and as far as she can figure, she really only has one option. “Tell them I’m invoking a Sequestering.”

Steve turns his head to look at her, brows high on his forehead. “Really? I didn’t think people did that anymore.”

She shrugs. “Not really, no. But this is a unique situation, don’t you think?” She meets his gaze and can see him struggling with accepting her decision. It probably feels like a deception to him. However, as far as international laws go, a Sequestering Invocation is not something that people mess with. Not even Steven Grant Rogers.

Historically speaking, the tradition was established to help a bonded pair get to know one another...without the interference of overbearing relatives. It was not uncommon for a bonded pair to meet, marry the next day (if they were of age), and then cite their sequestering rights before traipsing off into the wilderness to be left alone for sometimes months at a time.

By law, both friends and family were not allowed to make contact with the pair until receiving correspondence from the couple reinitiating contact. The couple were also pardoned from any work or duties that were required of them and were given a small pension from whichever government they lived under until they returned.

This practice was still regularly used among bonded pairs up until as late as the 1960s, though it began to wane after that. Around that time, it fell out of vogue to marry so quickly after finding one another, which gave the pair time to establish a true relationship without the aid of a Sequestering.

It is an unsatisfactory solution, but Darcy isn’t ready just yet to share with her family who her soulmate actually is. Nor is she even remotely ready to defend her decision to stay in a foreign country with her former assassin soulmate. She can practically hear the worry in her mother’s voice just thinking about what that conversation will be like. She knows she could attempt to pretend that she is still in the States, working away in Stark labs, but she also knows that she is a terrible liar and her father has a nose for deceit. She could never keep up the act. And she can’t just ignore them outright for God knows how long. Not without worrying them into a frenzy. At least if they are notified of an official Sequestering, they will have answers. Some, anyway.

“And if they ask who he is? What should I tell them?” Steve is testing her, she can tell.

Darcy looks back out over the city. “Tell them the truth. Tell them that he’s a good man, but his identity is not one that you can divulge without violating about a hundred of Stark’s NDAs, which is technically true. Tony’s got his fingers in enough confidential pies that it’s unlikely they will conclude it’s Barnes.” She chances a glance back at him.

He’s not glaring down at her, per se, but he’s certainly displeased. “Technically,” he says with disapproval.

She gives a wan smile and just shrugs her shoulders. Steve shakes his head but seems to accept her answer and her decision. He turns his attention back out over the city. Darcy watches him in profile for a while.

“Thank you,” she says solemnly. “For getting me here. For agreeing to all this. For helping me.”

His lips twitch up into a sad smile. “Bucky’s family. And that makes you family, too,” he says, like it’s that simple to him. Which it is. She’s learning that that’s just the kind of man Steve is.

Moisture gathers along her lashes as she lifts her arms up. “Pick me up, big guy. I need a bear hug.” Steve grins and complies, ducking to wrap his arms around her waist and then hoisting her up against his chest. She clings to his shoulders, her feet dangling a foot above the ground. She feels the chaste press of his lips in her hair and on her cheek. His scruff scrapes her skin irritatingly but she ignores it.

Softly, he asks, “You’re gonna take good care of him, aren’t you?”

His voice sounds so lost, almost childlike, in her ear. She nods. “Of course. Of course I will. I promise.”

Steve gives a shuddering sigh and tightens his grip around her ribs before setting her back on her feet. “Okay,” he murmurs roughly. He clears his throat and turns to stare out across the city again. “Okay.”

***

Natasha brushes a kiss across her cheek and sweeps some of Darcy’s hair back over her shoulder. They’re back at Barnes’ apartment building, standing in the doorway of his cramped little home and saying their goodbyes. Steve and Tony have already said their piece and given their farewells. Tony’s was expectedly brief with his usual dose of sarcastic wit and devil may care attitude. Steve’s, however, was surprisingly just as brief, though, if she thought about it, he likely was too torn up about the situation to linger. Darcy doesn’t blame him in the slightest.

Nat loops the shoulder strap of a huge black duffle bag over Darcy’s head and makes sure her legs don’t buckle under its weight. Her green eyes scan speculatively over her face and then she is pulling Darcy into a tight embrace and whispering Russian goodbyes in her ear. Then, Darcy finds herself alone in the place where her other half almost died.

She wanders around the apartment listlessly for a while, looking at the bits and pieces of Barnes’ life that he’d managed to put together here. He hasn’t been back since he’d run. She knows this for sure since they’ve kept the place under constant surveillance. The bloodied mattress remains in the middle of the floor, a grisly monument to their first moments together.

Eventually she grows bored with her snooping. The apartment isn’t large enough to begin with to provide much to look at in the first place. She sighs and checks the time, only to be disappointed at the snail’s pace that time was dragging at. She decides to raid the fridge for a late lunch. She’s not all that hungry but it’s something to do. She eats slowly, picking at her meal, and then takes the time to wash her plate in the sink and set it in the drying rack.

The contents of her duffle bag end up keeping her entertained for the better part of two hours, especially once she discovered the promised Widow’s bites. Practice makes perfect, right? So she practices using the Bites to shock the ever loving hell out of various bits of Barnes’ apartment. There’s quite a bit of fun when she gets to the forged passports and IDs. She enjoys imagining the kind of life that “Leslie Ann Haliburton” from Little Rock, Arkansas has lived and how on earth she ended up in Eastern Europe. Darcy’s surprised to find that Natasha has included false identification for Barnes as well.

The cash is fun. She spreads it across the floor and rolls around in it, pretending to be a billionaire for what is an embarrassingly long amount of time. She tries on the clothes Nat has packed for her. All good quality, nothing fancy, mostly casual. Pieces that wouldn’t make her stand out in a crowd. Clothes she could disappear in.

She runs out of things to look at in her duffle, so she packs it all away again and hefts the bag to rest against the base of the kitchen island. It’s late afternoon now and still no sign of Barnes despite her having been there for hours. She quells the swell of despair from her gut and decides a nap is just the thing she needs. Shut off her brain for a few hours. She eyes the blood stained mattress dubiously but her options are limited. She goes in search of a linen closet, thinking that throwing a couple thick blankets over the mattress would be a better option than trying to sleep on the floor.

She finds the closet easily enough and pulls the string dangling from the bare light bulb attached to the ceiling. With illumination comes horror. The tiny walk in closet is maybe the size of two phone booths, a space just large enough for a grown man to sit inside. One wall is lined with shelves, half of which do indeed hold linens, while the other half holds stacks of notebooks. There are a couple more notebooks scattered on the floor.

These things are not what upsets her. It’s the frantically scribbled phrases written on every square inch of the inside of the tiny space. “Go back to sleep,” and “please just go back to fucking sleep,” and the most eery of all, in big black jagged letters, _“counting bodies like sheep.”_ Her stomach rolls and threatens to empty its contents but she wills the sensation away, focuses on breathing through her nose. She grabs blindly at the closest blankets to her and hastens out of the closet, shutting the door behind her as if she could close away her soulmate’s madness if she just slammed the door hard enough.

How many nights had he sat in that closet, gripped by insomnia and waking nightmares and memories that tore at his sanity? She closes her eyes tight against the mental picture, presses her face into the wool between her hands as tears seep from the corners of her eyes. She breathes deeply and is surprised to find that the scent of the blankets soothes her and that they smell faintly of him.

She spreads the blankets out over his mattress with trembling hands, careful to cover every inch of the blood stained bed. She sinks back on her heels, inspects her work for a moment.

“Well, you’ve made your bed, Darcy Lewis. There’s nothing left to do but lie in it.” Alone for a few short hours and she’s already talking to herself. Perhaps she and her soulmate could bond over each other’s unhinged natures. She shakes her head, crawls onto her bed, and slumps down face first. Daylight is pouring through the broken window Barnes dove through when she falls asleep.

When she wakes, it’s dark and she’s flat on her back, having rolled over at some point while she slept. And she is not alone anymore. She can’t see him, but she can feel the press of his hand against her sternum, holding her to the mattress.

And there’s the cold press of a gun barrel digging into her cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is an awesome piece of fan art that inspired the closet scene which you can find [here](https://holdmecloseandfast.tumblr.com/post/172215260743/frostbitebakery-counting-bodies-like-sheep) by [frostbitebakery](https://frostbitebakery.tumblr.com) on tumblr. So go look at it if you wanna feel all the sad feelings in your heart.


	5. Black Flies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy and Bucky have some chats. It goes swell.

“Who are you?”

The voice is rough but Darcy recognizes it with a jolt. Instinctively, her hands rise to grasp at his metal wrist, just above the hand that is keeping her pinned to the mattress. She merely clings to it, doesn’t even attempt to dislodge it because she knows it would be a pointless venture. 

“Who  _ are you?”  _ he asks again, with more urgency. 

“I’ve already told you. I’m Darcy Lewis, your soulmate, so maybe you could stop with the gun in my face thing?” She sounds small and breathless, her bravado laughable, even to her own ears.

“That’s bullshit. Who sent you? Who is your handler?”

Darcy absorbs that for a minute. “Are you--are you serious? Who  _ sent me? _ Nobody sent me, asshole. I chose to come here because I’m your  _ soulmate.  _ And what the hell? Do I look like I’ve got a handler? I’m the most non-threatening person on the planet.” 

The gun cuts tighter into her cheek. “You’re lying. You’re--you’re a trap. A--a-”

“Trap? Did you forget the part where I saved your life? Or the part where you occasionally share my thoughts and feelings?”

The hand on her chest spasms and she can feel him vibrating with some strong emotion. She has no idea what that might be because his face is in shadow. She prays to Thor that it’s relief or some non lethal emotion making him shake. 

“Nononono,” he mutters. It doesn’t give her much confidence that her prayers have worked. “That’s not possible...Hydra- Hydra made you, made us linked somehow. Forged a soulbond to make me think...make me believe-” 

He is losing it, and fast, and she isn’t about to sit around and get shot in the face because her soulmate is a total nutcase. “Bucky!” she interrupts sharply. “You saw me here, with Captain America. You remember? You know who he is. How he feels about you. The kind of man he is. Do you really think he would lead some Hydra experiment to your doorstep? Do you really think he would bring me to you without first vetting me and my family history back at least six generations?”

Bucky’s shaking stills and Darcy’s racing pulse slows slightly. He’s still holding her down but the gun isn’t pressed to her with such bruising force, merely resting lightly against her cheek. She loosens her grip on his wrist. “I’m not here to hurt you,  _ I promise.  _ I just want to help you with...whatever you need.”

“It’s just not possible,” he says with a despairing finality that should probably terrify her. At this point, she is beyond the ability to feel that kind of soul-deep dread. She is only exhausted and numb.

“You know what?” she snaps. “Go ahead and shoot me in the head. I’m so fucking done. I am scared, alone in a foreign country, and my soulmate is a lunatic who wants to kill me. So yeah. Just get it over with, because I’m done with this shit. Either shoot me, or leave me the hell alone so I can go back to sleep because I am so fucking tired Bucky. So goddamn tired.”

She releases his wrist and lets her hands flop to the mattress on either side. She lets her muscles go slack against the bed and shuts her eyes. There’s nothing but the quiet sound of his ragged breathing for several painfully long moments. She doesn’t want to die like this, but if he wants to kill her, she has no way to stop him. She is merely accepting the inevitable. 

He shifts beside her and suddenly the gun is no longer pressed to her face, nor is his hand against her chest. She stays still, listens to the rustle of his clothes as he rises and walks away from her. There’s a scrape from one of the kitchen chairs. 

“I’m not gonna shoot you.” 

Her eyes snap open and she flushes with relief. Rolling on to her side, she can see him in silhouette sitting at the kitchen table. His head is turned towards her and she knows instinctively that he is staring at her as unblinkingly as she is staring at him. It is a strange standoff, the two of them just watching each other, neither moving but to draw slow breaths into their lungs. She notices passively that their breathing syncs up almost immediately. That bothers her for some reason so she intentionally holds her breath for a moment to throw off her rhythm. It does no good; she matches him breath for breath the moment she lets her mind wander. 

She stops trying to fight it and just closes her eyes. 

***

When she wakes, he’s still sitting at the table. Staring. She doubts he’s moved all night. 

“Why are you here?”

Darcy scrubs a hand over her face and rolls onto her back with a groan. She flings an arm over her eyes to block the light streaming in through the window. “Dude, you had a gun in my face last night. I’m not talking to you until I’ve had breakfast and at least two cups of coffee.” He doesn’t respond. 

She lays there sullenly for perhaps another ten minutes before she realizes that she isn’t tired enough to fall back asleep. She doesn’t look at him when she rises and goes directly to the bathroom. She feels the weight of his eyes on her the entire time until she snaps the bathroom door closed. It’s a brief reprieve, one that she tries to prolong as much as she can, but she knows she must eventually face him. 

Even so, she refuses to meet his gaze as she side steps him and begins to prepare herself coffee and breakfast in the kitchen. It’s just scrambled eggs and toast, simple enough that she doesn’t have to worry about burning anything while her mind is so distracted. She feels stupid for it, even as she does it, but she makes enough for both of them, divvying up the portions onto two plates and pouring coffee into two ceramic mugs. 

She sets his in front of him along with a fork and then takes her seat across from him. She still hasn’t looked at him. She opts for keeping her eyes locked on her eggs as she picks at them. She can tell he isn’t eating though, which bothers her, so she finally looks up. He’s sitting ramrod straight in his chair, just watching her, his hands gripping the edge of the table. His eyes are even more beautiful than she remembers and that sliding, shifting feeling of falling into place hits her again. 

It pisses her off. 

“Why aren’t you eating?” 

He glances down at his plate then back up at her. He says nothing but there is a slick feeling of suspicion bubbling inside her head and she knows it’s coming from him. 

Her left brow lifts to a sharp peak. “It’s not poisoned,” she tells him flatly. When he still doesn’t move, she gives an exasperated sigh and reaches across the table to spear a mouthful of his eggs. She chews and swallows quickly and then grabs his toast, taking a large bite. She swallows it down with a swig from his coffee. She sets the toast back on his plate and returns resolutely to her own meal. Three seconds later, from the corner of her eye, she catches the movement of him picking up his fork. He takes a tentative bite and then gives an unconscious grunt of approval or perhaps pleasure. She feels oddly smug about it, like she’s won some kind of battle between them. 

Her mother always said men were more sensible when they’d had food in them. She hopes the adage turns out to be true in this case. She finishes her breakfast and rinses her plate in the sink. Darcy squints at her empty mug, mulling over whether or not she needs the jitters of a second cup of coffee.  _ Screw it.  _ She pours another and wanders over to the window above his radiator. Flicking aside the sheer curtain, she reaches up to strip off a swath of newspaper. The view outside isn’t much better than the view inside but at least she doesn’t have to look at him.

There’s a fly buzzing against the bottom of the windowsill, stuck on its back and spinning endlessly. Sipping from the mug she cradles between both hands, she watches it with something like empathy. Poor thing, trapped by the failures of its own biology. She extends a finger and tips it over off its wings. It stills and then flies off to some other part of the apartment. Not much for gratitude, flies. 

Behind her, Barnes is quietly clearing the table and putting his dishes in the sink with soft clinks. She flinches when she senses him moving closer. She refuses to turn and look at him. 

“Thank you.” It’s soft, so soft she might have imagined it. “I haven’t eaten in....a while.”

That makes her turn despite her resolve. “How long is a while?” He is closer than she expected. She rocks back a pace. His eyes catch the movement and he mirrors her, letting the space between them widen to something more comfortable. 

“At least three days,” he shrugs. He’s bigger than she was expecting, even though she can tell he is desperately trying to make himself smaller. Shoulders curved in, head ducked, eyes demurely studying the tiles between them. 

“You still hungry?” Sharp blue eyes snap to hers and then back down. He gives a curt nod. “I can make more?” she suggests. 

The blue is back, clouded with confusion. “Why?”

She tries very hard not to let her tone imply that he is an idiot. “Because...you’re hungry?”

“No. Why are you being...nice? When I was going to shoot you last night?” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Darcy notices his left hand twitch and whir against his thigh. 

“It’s my job, apparently.” She adds as an afterthought, “and I promised Steve I’d take care of you.” 

Barnes visibly flinches at Steve’s name and she swears she can hear his teeth grinding together. “Seems like a shitty job,” he mutters. 

She lets off a bark of bitter laughter. “Well, you’re not wrong.” She instantly regrets her words when she’s hit with a wave of hurt from their soulbond. She shakes off the feeling. “What would you like to eat?” she asks with a resigned sigh. 

“Don’t worry about it. I can take care of myself,” he grumbles and abruptly turns away from her to stalk over to the fridge. 

Darcy runs a hand down her face. This is all going so splendidly. Her mug makes a heavy clunk in the sink as she sets it down. The feel of her day old clothes is starting to wear at her nerves, her shirt wrinkled and her tights twisted just enough to drive her batty. She decides now is a good enough time to shower and put on fresh clothes. These are starting to smell too much like regret for her taste. 

When she returns from the bathroom, fresh faced and clean clothed, she half hopes that he won’t be there. She’s not that lucky. 

He’s poking through her duffle, shuffling passports between his hands. “Is there a reason you have falsified documents with my face on them?”

“I dunno, dude. You’re gonna have to talk to Natasha about that.” He grunts in response and the dismissal angers her. She uncrosses her arms to plant her hands on her hips. “You do know it’s considered rude to dig through other people’s possessions, don’t you?”

He doesn’t look up or stop pawing through her bag, pushing aside a pair of underwear in favor of picking up her new taser. “Didn’t stop you from digging through my apartment yesterday,” he finally replies. 

She flushes with embarrassment. “You were watching me?” It sounds like an accusation. 

“I haven’t taken my eyes off you since you got here, lady.” 

“Creepy much?” she mumbles under her breath. He hears it anyway and she sees the first sign of a personality from the man in the form of a wry grin that barely turns the corners of his mouth up. 

“A strange woman barges into  _ my  _ apartment, begs me to let her get in bed with me, and then tells me she’s my soulmate the next day. You don’t think that affords me some leeway in the ‘creep’ department?” He cocks a brow up, waiting for her response. 

She opens her mouth, but nothing comes to mind, so she closes it again. He nods to himself and turns his attention back to her bag. Darcy stays silent while he digs around for a few minutes more. When he’s finished his perusal, he tidies up her things and zips her bag back up. 

He stands slowly and looks at her again from head to toe, like he’s sizing her up. Her hair is still wet and starting to create a damp spot on the front of her shirt, which she absolutely  _ hates  _ but there isn’t much she can do about it seeing as how her soulmate is a heathen that doesn’t own a hair dryer. She feels exposed with him looking at her like that, exposed and foolish. 

“Why are you here?” he asks abruptly. 

Darcy opens her mouth to respond but he holds his hand up to stop her. 

“No, I mean, I get it, that you’re my soulmate and that’s why you’re here. But...what does that mean? How long are you staying? What are you...what do you expect from me?”

“I don’t expect anything. I’m just...I’m just gonna be with you. Forever, I guess.” She twists her wet hair between her fists. 

“Forever? That sounds like a terrible plan on your part.”

“Hey,” she snaps, flinging one hand in the air, “don’t blame me.  _ I  _ didn’t come up with this soulmate bullshit. You’re gonna have to take that up with the universe or biology or whoever is calling all the shots here because it sure as shit isn’t  _ me.” _ Barnes stares at her, obviously uncomfortable after her outburst. She is starting to get the sense that yelling at him is a good way to get him to close himself off. 

“You don’t have to stay,” he says quietly. “Soulmate or not, I don’t expect you to stay with me.”

Darcy licks her lips. “Yes, I do. Okay? Just...trust me on this. I want to stay.” 

“What about...you got family? Somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“What about them? You can’t just disappear. They’re gonna worry. Especially if you tell them about...me.”

Darcy loosens a slow breath. “They don’t know who you are. And I invoked a Sequestering, so I bought myself some time before I have to face any of the consequences of being linked to you.” 

Barnes’ eyes widen at the implications of an invocation. “I won’t marry you,” he says firmly. 

She cocks her head and narrows her eyes at him. “That was never on the table.”

“Oh.”

“Nor any romantic relationship, for that matter.” She has mulled this aspect of the soulbond over in her mind often since meeting Barnes. With the amount of trauma he carries, she doesn’t think anything beyond a platonic relationship is even possible for them. 

_ “Oh,” _ he says again, though this time it carries the tone of something being understood. “Because of St-” he chokes on the syllable and tries again, “because of Captain Rogers.”

He says it like it’s an obvious statement but she is lost. “What about him?”

“You and he…” Barnes gestures vaguely at her. “I saw him kiss you. At your hotel. And you were holding each other when I woke up after…”

Darcy’s left brow shoots up, followed closely by the right. “Steve is family. And he was hurting over you. He’s been hurting over you for an awful long time without letting anyone comfort him, so yeah, that’s what that was.”

“So then why…”

“Because you’ve got some major baggage, Barnes. I want to be here, I want to be near you and help you and be your friend, but I am not….equipped to handle anything more than a friendship with you.”

An uncomfortable silence settles between them and neither one can really look at the other. 

“That makes sense,” he finally replies. 

“So, you’ll let me stay?” His eyes catch hers and he gives a slow nod. 

“Alright,” she says with a measure of finality. She wipes her hands down the front of her jeans. “Okay. So. If we’re gonna be friends, maybe we should kind of have a fresh start?” She steps forward and sticks her hand out into the space between them. “Hello, my name is Darcy Lewis, it’s nice to meet you.” 

He stares at her hand, like it’s going to bite him, and then slowly extends his own hand to bridge the space between them. “Nice to meet you, Miss-”

His words cut off as soon as his palm slides against hers. Not that she could hear him even if he’d continued. Her brain is abruptly bombarded by a slew of thoughts and feelings that cannot possibly be her own. It’s overwhelming and it brings her to her knees. 

Barnes scrabbles back from her and the chaos instantly stills in her head. He is breathing hard, knocked to his knees as well and holding his hand to his chest as if she’s branded him. 

“What the hell was  _ that?” _

“Soulmate bullshit,” Darcy grumbles between gasps. Her heart is beating too fast and it’s making her dizzy. She folds forward until she can rest her forehead against the cool tile. 

“You okay?” He already sounds composed, though she imagines mainlining the inside of her head is probably considerably less disorienting than the inside of  _ his.  _ She swallows and nods her head, keeping her eyes closed until the dizziness passes. 

“Sorry,” he mutters. 

“It’s fine. Let’s just, let’s just not touch each other,” she says, finally raising up to sit on her heels. 

“Yeah. Okay.” 

An aching loneliness stings along the freshly opened paths inside her mind that his touch has left behind. It’s fresher and deeper than the emotions she’s picked up from him before. Her gut clenches and aches at the thought that this is her new reality. 

She’s not sure how she’s going to bear it. 


	6. Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their traveling days begin.

It is a godsend when Barnes escapes to the bathroom, presumably to shower. Darcy is relieved, and not just because she has a moment to breathe without his presence weighing on her, but because he also smells like he’s been sleeping in a dumpster. If he slept at all. 

She wonders if he really was watching her the whole time. The thought sends shivers up her spine. She shies away from that complicated line of thought. She makes another cup of coffee while she waits for him to return because she has nothing else better to do and she has never been very good at keeping still. 

The extra caffeine is a mistake, one she recognizes immediately when Barnes steps out of the bathroom. He’s bare to the waist, wrapped in a towel, and his hair clings to his head and neck in wet clumps. One look at him and her heart is racing, blood thundering through her veins and making her dizzy. He may be a complicated, horrible mess of a human being but, by god, is he a pretty one. 

She’s staring too long and he clears his throat, looking uncomfortable. Darcy drops her eyes to the floor and focuses on something, anything, else. She hears the door to the bathroom close and when he comes out once more, he is thankfully fully clothed. His hair is still dripping against the collar of his cream colored henley. It’s easier to watch the way the cream turns a darker shade than it is to meet the harsh blue of his eyes. 

“We need to leave. This place isn’t safe anymore.” 

Her eyes catch the way his jaw clenches shut after he speaks. She drags her gaze from the movement, meeting his. “Yeah, I agree. This place is much too small for us, anyway. Luckily for you, I just came into a large sum of money, so no need to rent, um, less than ideal apartments. We can afford something with actual bedrooms. Two of them. You know, because privacy is a thing. I spotted some really classy looking apartments near the museum district...” Damn caffeine is making her too jabbery. She tucks her hair behind her ears and swallows. Her hands are subtly shaking. 

Barnes stares at her like she is an idiot. She is inclined to agree with his assessment. He lifts his brow before telling her, “We’re leaving the country.” He licks his lips and breaks eye contact. “I’m leaving the country. You can come with me, if that’s still what you want.” He glances back up at her and she nods in confirmation. 

“Okay...where will we go?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know yet.” 

He’s lying. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she is absolutely sure he’s lying. “Is there a reason you’re not telling me the truth right now?” she asks bluntly. 

His eyes darken and he shuffles stiffly. “I don’t want anyone to know where I’m going.” 

He just stares at her, no other explanation, until it hits her. “You don’t want me to tell Steve where we are,” she says. He flinches at the name, his shoulders tightening up towards his ears, and nods. “Are you planning on keeping me blindfolded for the rest of our lives? Because I will eventually figure out where we are. I’m actually pretty damn crafty.” 

“No. I don’t know. I just don’t want  _ him _ knowing…” 

“I won’t tell him, if that bothers you so much. Steve’s gonna throw a fucking fit about it, but I can keep a secret.” 

Barnes grits his teeth. “Can you  _ please _ stop using his name?”

Darcy stares at him. “Why?”

“Hurts,” he grunts. “Hydra conditioning,” he says, gesturing toward his head. 

“Oh. Shit. Sorry?”

“‘S fine,” he mumbles and turns away from her. She watches him kneel on the wood floor and then abruptly thrust his metal fist through the floor. Darcy yelps at the strange burst of violence, only to be further bewildered when he jerks a backpack out of the gaping hole he’s just made. He flicks his eyes up at her, an apologetic look on his face, and then stalks to his closet. She listens to him shove what is most likely his journals into the bag and possibly a change of clothes. She doesn’t investigate further because like hell is she getting close to that awful closet ever again. He exits the closet and steps around her to pull open a kitchen drawer. He shuffles a couple odds and ends from the drawer into the bag. 

“Bug-out bag?”

“Yep,” he mutters, zipping his backpack closed. He pulls his arms through the straps and closes the buckle at his chest with a click. He looks up at her expectantly. 

“Oh!” Darcy says with a jerk. “We’re leaving? Right now?”

He nods and when she doesn’t immediately retrieve her bag, he does it for her. He drops her bag on the kitchen island and opens it, digging around inside until he pulls out the baggy of burner phones Natasha had stashed in there. She watches silently as he takes each one out, delicately taking them apart and removing what she suspects are bugs. He lines them up in a little row on the table and then holds his hand out to her expectantly. She stares at him blankly and then remembers her own Stark phone, resting safely in her back pocket. She pulls it out and places it in his hand, careful not to touch his skin while she does it. She’s not certain if skin to skin contact will create another superhighway of feelings but she isn’t about to risk it. He transfers her phone to his other hand and closes the metal digits in a tight fist. Her phone dies in a heartbreaking crunch. 

A sharp cry slips from her lips. “What the hell, Barnes? Couldn’t you just debug mine as well? Did you have to murder it?!”

“The others were burners,” he says with a shrug. “They can’t be traced. Yours has too much of Stark’s tech. He could find you in less than a second with that thing, bug or no.”

“Okay, that’s nice. But  _ maybe  _ I could have just left it here instead of you  _ crushing  _ it?” she sounds shrill, but damnit she’s pissed. She had kept half her life documented on that thing. 

“Oh.” He blinks at her and she resists the urge to verbally eviscerate him. Instead she tosses her hands in the air and marches to his front door. 

“Well?” she snaps. “Are we leaving or not?” 

He nods, tosses the burner phones back in her bag and zips it closed before joining her at the front door. “After you, miss.” 

“Manners won’t save you now, Barnes. You killed my favorite toy.” She steps out into the hall and he follows her with a sigh. 

***

He ends up dragging her to six different banks, ultimately withdrawing just over fifty thousand euros, before hopping on a bus to Constanta. It’s a relatively short trip to the coast, not more than three hours, but it seems to last forever to Darcy. They don’t talk. She’s still sore about him needlessly breaking her phone. 

When they finally do make it to Constanta, they trek to the nearest hotel that doesn’t look decrepit and Darcy holes up while Barnes takes off to do god knows what. 

She’s flopped on one of the double beds, arms spread out looking like the martyr that she feels like, and staring up at the ceiling when he finally returns. He glances at her on the bed and then sets a brown paper bag down on the little table in the room. He returns to the door, peering out and then latching the chain. He moves to the front window, twitching aside the curtain to peek outside. 

In the short hours that Darcy has spent with him out in the world, she has discovered that he is alarmingly paranoid. Always double and triple checking that they’re not being followed. It tugs at her empathy. No one should have to live like this, always looking for the next threat. 

She’s been staring at him too long. He must sense her eyes on him because he turns his attention away from the window to pin her with his gaze. 

“What is it?” he asks. 

She flinches and shakes her head. “Nothing. Just watching you, I guess.”

His eyes grow wary. He gestures at the paper bag on the table. “I got you dinner,” he mumbles, turning back to his surveillance, clearly uncomfortable. 

Darcy perks up at the mention of food. It’s been hours since she’s eaten, and a crappy little bus station sandwich it was, so she’s famished at this point. She rolls off the bed and eagerly tears open the bag to find containers of sarmale and mici. She notices that Barnes didn’t grab any forks, but she’s happy enough to eat it with her hands like a heathen, she’s so hungry. She picks up the carton of sarmale and joins Barnes by the window. 

As far as she can tell, the street outside looks completely normal. Absolutely nothing about the scene outside their window seems alarming to her. She holds out the carton towards Barnes who takes a cabbage roll. 

“Thanks,” he says quietly. 

Her mouth is full so she just hums in response. 

“We’re leaving in the morning,” Barnes states.

“I figured when you only reserved the room for one night. Where are we going next?”

“Istanbul. I got us tickets for a passenger ship across the Black Sea. It’s slightly slower than taking the bus, but it’s one less customs to pass through if we’re not traveling through Bulgaria. The less closely people are looking at us, the better.”

Darcy nods, chewing slowly. “Makes sense.”  They eat and watch the world grow dark outside their window. “I’ve never been to Istanbul before,” she says softly. She’s never been a lot of places, really. Norway is probably the most exotic place she’s ever been. 

“Neither have I,” he replies. “That’s probably a good thing, though,” he adds. She’s pleasantly surprised to see the hint of a smile curving his lips, lending a gentle humor to the statement. 

She smiles back and hands him another roll. 

***

After dinner, with Barnes’ supervision, Darcy texts Steve on one of the burner phones. 

**Darcy:** **Hey It Happened Once In a Dream, it’s Eagle One. Just wanna let you know everything is a-ok over here. Met up with Eagle Two. Meet up was a little rocky but we’re good now. We’re even planning an extended road trip together! Oh and we’re gonna be going dark so, ya know, don’t panic when I drop off the face of the earth. I’ll contact you if I need anything.**

“It Happened Once In A Dream? What does that mean?” Barnes asks, poring over her message. Likely checking to make sure she’s not tipping off Cap. 

“Haven’t you ever heard of a code name?” She asks, snatching the phone back. Under her breath she mutters, “what kinda shitty spy work…”

Barnes’ mouth tightens at the corners. “I was used more for hits than espionage but I’ve never seen any code names like that.” 

“Neither has St— Cap. You both are atrociously uncultured.” He merely grunts at her. “Can I send this now? I promise I’m not up to any shenanigans.” Barnes nods and she presses send. The phone buzzes in her hand in under a minute. 

**Steve:** **That explains the cash withdrawals.**

**Darcy: Yep.**

**Steve: I don’t like this.**

**Darcy: Didn’t think you would, big guy, but I’m not calling the shots at the moment. Just along for the ride.**

There’s an extended pause while Darcy waits for Steve’s response. 

**Steve:** **Can you tell me where you’re headed?**

**Darcy: No. I don’t really know yet and even if I did…**

**Steve: He doesn’t want me to know where he is.**

**Darcy: Bingo.**

**Steve: I don’t like that either.**

He sends another message before she can respond. 

**Steve:** **Please be careful.**

**Darcy: I’ll do my best.**

**Steve: That’s not exactly reassuring.**

**Darcy: It is what it is, Steve. I’ll contact you when I can. Take care of yourself.**

With that, she tosses the phone onto the hotel table and scrubs her hands over her face. 

***

“I’m sorry about your Stark phone.” His voice is barely above a whisper, but it travels the darkened space between their beds with ease in the quiet of their room. 

“I know,” she murmurs back. “I got over it hours ago.”

His bedsheets rustle softly and his mattress creaks. “I wasn’t thinking. Being around you...makes it hard for me to think.”

Her breath hitches at the confession. She isn’t sure what he means by it but she can feel anxious anticipation lazily unfurling across their soulbond. Whatever he means by it doesn’t matter, but her response to it does. “That is...understandable,” she says carefully. “I will try to be more patient.” Relief and something warmer replaces the anxiousness.

“Goodnight...Darcy.” 

“Goodnight, Bucky.” 

***

She fucking hates the ship. She spends the better part of the day puking her guts up in the tiny bathroom of their little cabin and praying for a swift death. Her only solace over the next twelve hours comes in the form of Bucky’s cool metal fingers brushing along her sweat dampened neck and temples. She can feel the worry and regret rolling off him and she does her best to reassure him in between dry heaves. 

***

Istanbul is the most beautiful city she’s ever seen in her life, if only for the fact that it is  _ land  _ and she is free from that hellish boat. 

She feels weak and exhausted as they make their way down one of the less busy streets near the docks. Her ribs and stomach ache, as does her head. She knows that they must have passed through customs at some point but she was too miserable at the time to pay attention to anything other than getting one foot in front of the other. When Bucky finally settles on a place to stay, she feels like weeping with relief. When she makes it to her hotel bed and flops down, she really does weep. 

“Never again, Barnes. Never again. We travel on land from now on, you hear me?” she groans, arm thrown out so she can point accusingly at him. 

“Yes ma’am.”

She’s nearly asleep, fully clothed and on top of her covers, when she feels his metal knuckles ghost over her cheek. She sighs into the touch and settles into sleep. 

***

They stay for three whole days in Istanbul and in that time she discovers that it really  _ is _ the most beautiful city she’s ever seen. 

There is an otherworldly quality to it; a haphazard clash between the East and the West that somehow all blends together beautifully. It’s warm, but not unbearably so, and extremely busy in a way that exhilarates her. The city is loud and charming and has a pervasive hospitality that sucks her in. 

They are only there three days but she already knows she will be back someday. And she already has offers from several of the locals for a place to stay. These are her kind of people, she thinks. Kind, friendly, eclectic. 

The architecture is incredible as well. She feels small and humbled standing next to buildings that date back to the Byzantine era. She visits the Sultanahmet Mosque the third day and weeps, overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure. She wonders how many knees have knelt and voices prayed in this sacred place in the hundreds of years since its construction. 

As irreverent as she is by nature, in this sacred space, Darcy feels the weight of its sanctity and finds herself oddly drawn into an uncharacteristic stillness of spirit. She tries to be as respectful as possible, wearing a floor length skirt and covering her head as is required. She walks quietly, conscious of the sound of her steps on the stone. 

When she leaves the Mosque, she carries the stillness with her as she wanders aimlessly down the streets. 

“Are you alright?” 

She is somewhat startled to find Bucky walking beside her, though they are miles from their hotel where he has been keeping to himself while she explored the city. She thinks perhaps he hasn’t been staying at the hotel at all the last three days. 

“Have you been following me?” 

“Yes.” He looks almost guilty, but not quite. 

“Why?” She asks it without accusation or anger or any strong emotion at all. She still feels as if she is in some kind of serene dream space and it’s hard to feel anything other than peaceful. 

He seems unsettled by her tone. “Because I worry. And our...association leaves you open to being targeted.” 

She nods and turns her head to trace the skyline. The sun is just starting to dip below the highest buildings and the city is turning golden. 

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asks, flicking her fingers in the direction of a tea garden just up ahead. 

His brows draw together in confusion but he gives a slow nod. She reaches for him, gripping his left hand and comforted by the knowledge that the metal won’t conduct their soulbond the way his flesh and blood hand would. He looks down at their linked hands, swallowing thickly. She tugs at him, growing impatient, until he follows demurely. 

They sip tea and watch the sun set. 

“We’re leaving in the morning,” he says without warning. 

This tugs her out from the pleasant haze she’s been in. “So soon?” 

His eyes are apologetic. “It’s better to keep moving.” His visage hardens as a thought occurs to him. “I got complacent—staying in Bucharest. I thought I could disappear there and no one would find me. But the Widow seems to have found me easily enough there. I don’t want to give her an opportunity to do it again.” 

“Natasha’s not so bad once you get to know her,” she teases. “But, then again,  _ I  _ never shot her in the stomach so…” 

His flesh hand tightens against his cup. “I don’t remember that,” he grumbles, and it’s clear by his tone that he doesn’t appreciate the revelation. 

Darcy eases back in her chair, breathing in the heady night air and letting the tension of the moment sweep past her. She’s not quite ready to upset the peace that’s settled over her today. She’ll let the regret and discomfort swallow her up tomorrow. But today...today she is serenity incarnate. 


	7. Woman Needs Man, and Man Must Have His Mate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The journey continues.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the title is a tip of the hat to "As Time Goes By" because Casablanca.
> 
> Come find me on [tumblr.](https://holdmecloseandfast.tumblr.com)

It’s a five hour flight from Istanbul to Casablanca. Bucky is so goddamn squirrelly the whole time that Darcy wishes she kept horse tranquilizers in her purse so the guy could check out and take a nap. His shifty little eyes are starting to wear on her. 

Except they aren’t little, they’re big and blue and terrified. The part of her that doesn’t want to smack the side of his head and tell him to chill wants to pull him into her arms and sift her fingers soothingly through his hair. Maybe smooth that irksome little crease between those endlessly blue eyes with the tip of her finger. 

She does none of these things. 

Instead, four hours into the flight, she buys six of those little bottles of whiskey, downs them in quick succession, and then takes herself a little tipsy snooze until the plane lands. She’s still a tad wobbly when they land. She plays it up as they pass through security and customs. It keeps the airport officials focused on her and not her traveling companion. Just another drunk American, taking in the sights. Bucky doesn’t say anything, but she feels a little swell of gratitude lapping at her from their soulbond. 

It might be the booze, but she can’t help but smile broadly at her own cleverness and thoughtfulness as they successfully exit the airport. She catches Bucky rolling his eyes so hard she’s sure he’ll strain something. Yes, it’s definitely the booze, then. 

She regrets the alcohol when morning comes. The older she gets, the less her body seems willing to tolerate intoxication and the more likely she is to be left with a horrendous hangover. Bucky is gone most of the day and she is grateful for it. The headache aspect of her hangover lingers longer than normal, staying with her for over a day even though she’s been hydrating and taking care of herself. 

It takes her a couple more days to realize that the low level headache is a side effect of the superpowered mind meld she and Barnes had inadvertently participated in. She feels him more frequently now, and it’s harder for her to pick through the strands of which emotion belongs to whom. The constant mental filtering is giving her a dull ache at the back of her skull that doesn’t seem to go away. 

After the fourth day of being in Casablanca, a full migraine descends on her. She mentally calculates the days and groans with understanding. 

“What is it?” Bucky asks softly. He’s been watching her with increasing concern over the last few days. 

Darcy is huddled beneath the comforter, blocking out as much light and sound as possible. She feels the mattress creak and dip when he joins her on the bed. She can feel him trying to decide what to do. She ends his misery and carefully peeks out from under her blankets, cracking one bleary eye. 

“You being in my head so much hurts,” she mumbles, her mouth feeling dry and tongue sticky. “And I’m about to start my period, which usually lands me with a headache. It’s all combining for one hell of a migraine.” She watches his mouth turn down into a frown. She doesn’t care if her frankness makes him uncomfortable. She doesn’t have the energy to circumnavigate his delicate masculinity. 

Bucky leaves shortly afterward without saying anything. 

He returns sometime later, though she isn’t sure how long. Time passes in excruciatingly small increments when she’s hurting like this. She’s in a light doze and he leaves her to her rest, though she can hear the muffled sound of him setting something on his bed followed by the sound of the fridge opening and closing. A sweet, tart taste floods her mouth and instantly has her stomach roiling. 

“Stop!” she croaks, rising up from the bed, one hand clutching her belly and the other flung in Barnes’ direction. “For the love of god, Bucky, stop eating.” 

Barnes looks confused and alarmed at her outcry with a half eaten plum halfway to his mouth. If she weren’t so miserable, she might have been able to laugh at how ridiculous he looks in this moment. 

Darcy scrunches her eyes closed and focuses on breathing through her nose. She is beyond relieved when the flavor fades from her mouth and her nausea dissipates. When she opens her eyes again, Bucky has moved startlingly close to her. He’s got a bottle of water in one hand and a paper bag hanging from the other. She takes the water from him, too startled to do anything else. 

Bucky settles onto the edge of her bed and rummages around in the paper bag, pulling out a little bottle of what she hopes like hell is migraine medicine. He shakes out two little white capsules into his palm and hands them to her. 

“Hope this isn’t cyanide,” she quips, before tossing them back with a gulp of water. 

“That’s not my M.O. for hits, sweetheart.” His lips tip up into a charming one sided grin. Or perhaps she is just feeling exceptionally charitable at the moment because he’s brought her sweet relief. 

“I got you some other things, too,” he says, clearing his throat and handing over the bag. 

She’s curious now because he is clearly anxious about her reaction and there is a light blush over his cheeks. She peeks in the bag to find an assortment of boxes in languages she can’t speak but the pictures are fairly informative. He’s brought her pads. And teas and chocolates and, she thinks, even a hot water bottle. It might just be the sorry state of her head or possibly her hormones but tears start to build at the corners of her eyes. 

Her voice is rough when she says, “Thank you.” She clears her throat and tries again. “You didn’t have to do all this,” she tells him, bewilderment laced in the syllables. 

He shrugs his shoulders, biting into his lower lip and letting his hair fall in front of his eyes. “I had sisters once. They had a hard time of it, too.” 

She wants to kiss him. She is appalled at herself, but goddammit she wants to kiss the pretty freckles that run over the bridge of his nose. She chalks it up to hormones and being in a weakened state and the fact that she isn’t even remotely prepared for how thoughtful he is turning out to be. 

“I have something else for you,” he says, interrupting the strange line her thoughts have taken. He reaches over to his bed and grabs his backpack from the comforter, pulling a notebook from one of the pockets. “This might help with the—“ he waves vaguely at his head with the notebook and then places it in her lap. “In the beginning...I had a hard time figuring out what was real—what was me and what was Hydra—and I’d get headaches too.” His hands clasp in front of him, his flesh thumb scraping over the top of his metal one. “It’s not the same,” he glances up at her, “but it might help anyway.” Again he shrugs, shrinking in on himself. 

“You’re really nice,” she sighs. 

Bucky’s eyes snap to hers and he huffs a bitter laugh. “I think those pills are kicking in.” 

“No, you  _ are,” _ she insists, reaching a hand out and gripping his jacket where it hangs open at his chest. She lurches forward and is surprised to find herself nearly nose diving into his beautifully broad chest. 

_ Beautifully broad? Jesus.  _

She straightens with Barnes’ help. “What kinda headache medicine was  _ that?”  _

Something mischievous twinkles in his eyes as he settles her back down onto her pillows. “The  _ really good _ kind,” he smiles, taking her paper bag of goodies and setting it to the side. Her limbs feel heavy and liquid and she feels  _ good.  _ Her headache is a distant memory. Bucky tucks her blankets up to her shoulders. 

“I’m not sleepy,” she declares, but she can’t be bothered to sit up again because she is suddenly ridiculously comfortable in this hotel bed with a ridiculously handsome man hovering over her like the best goddamn nursemaid money could buy. 

“Okay, you wanna watch tv or something?” He’s standing at her bedside, hands on his hips, looking for all the world like he wants nothing more than to please her. 

Adorable.

“How am I being adorable?” 

Shit. “Never mind,” she slurs. “I don’t wanna watch tv. I want you to talk to me.”

He blinks at her, like she’s grown another head. He sinks back down onto her bed. “Well, what do you want me to talk about?” 

“Tell me about the war, grandpa. And what it was like when milk cost a nickel.” Some distant, rational part of her brain realizes that she’s giggling. The rational part proves to be utterly useless and does zero things to shut down the giggling. 

“I honestly have very little to say about either of those topics. And as far as I’m aware, I’m nobody’s grandpa. Thank god.” 

“That’s a shame. All that good bone structure and no progeny to benefit from it.” She’s fairly certain that’s what has come out of her mouth. Everything is a little soft around the edges. 

Bucky’s mouth pinches closed, full lips drawn tight and thin, and his eyes grow wide. 

***

He isn’t sure what to make of her like this. She’s babbling things at him that make little sense. She’s lovely and lively and giggling, telling him stories about herself that he is only barely following. Mainly because her storytelling lacks any coherent context for him. She speaks of people he’s never met as if he knows who they are, as if he’s been present for all these instances. He supposes that, in a way, he has. 

She tells him the story of when she was seven and broke her right hand against the face of a little boy that tried to steal her hard-earned allowance. He glances at his own hand, fist opening and closing against a memory. 

“I think I remember that, actually,” he confesses. 

“What?” Darcy’s eyes are trying their damndest to focus on his face. She looks both beautiful and absurd, the movements of her hands and head uncoordinated as she converses with him. Her hair is a dark halo against her pillow. “What?” she asks again, flicking out her hand to thump his chest, drawing him from his thoughts. 

“I’m not sure...but I think I remember feeling when you broke your hand. The timing is about right. I was on a...mission. Was about to take my shot but missed when my hand spasmed with pain. Jerked the rifle too hard and my bullet went wide. It botched the whole mission and my target went back into hiding. The higher ups were pissed, had me beaten senseless and thrown back in cryo. I couldn’t explain what happened because I didn’t understand it.” He shrugs and something in Darcy’s face looks fearful, concerned. His instinct is to comfort her, but he isn’t sure what he’s comforting against so he does nothing. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, tongue flicking out to wet her lips. “For hurting you. Getting you beaten.”

He chuckles darkly. “Don’t be. I don’t know who the target was but you likely saved a good man’s life. And it sounds like that Dylan kid had it coming anyway.” 

Her cheeks pink pleasantly and she smiles at him, a soft, tender little tilt to her lips that warms him to his toes. “You  _ are _ nice,” she sighs, her long lashes brushing her cheeks with each slow blink of her eyes. She’s finally getting sleepy, if the jaw cracking yawn she gives is any indication. 

“You wanna take that nap now, doll?” 

She nods and mutters something at him, eyes already closed. She rolls onto her side and tucks her hands together under her chin. She’s sweet like this, all drugged up, and not the cranky woman he’s gotten accustomed to. He wonders if maybe this is what she’s really like—vibrant and open—but he just brings out the worst in her. Figures. 

***

As is expected, she starts bleeding the following day. It’s tiresome and messy as usual but the headache is gone. Bucky’s care package from the day before proves to be exactly what she needs. 

He brings her fried fish for dinner and she cries. He thinks he’s done something wrong but she assures him that Lewis women get weepy on their cycles and she’s just astoundingly happy at the thought of fried  _ anything.  _

She weeps again, this time in misery, when he tells her they’ll be leaving again in two days’ time. By boat. For a two week journey. 

“Ah, Bucky  _ no.  _ You  _ promised.”  _

“I know, but I can’t risk flying again. Too many eyes and ears and cameras.” 

Her face crumples at the thought of two weeks of throwing her guts up. She hates how easily she cries during these times. The frustration and embarrassment at herself only serves to make the tears flow faster over her cheeks in hot streams. 

Bucky’s brows draw together and his head tilts to the side, sympathy pouring from his eyes. “Darcy, don’t cry, please? I’ll get you some of those patches so you won’t get sick and I’ll...do whatever you need me to do to help you feel better. I promise, honey, this is the safest way for us to get to Brazil.” He looks a little desperate when she answers him with a hiccuping sob. “Please?” he rasps. “I need us to be safe.” 

Darcy dabs at her eyes with her sleeves and nods. “Okay,” she relents. “You better get me  _ all _ the good meds if I’m gonna do this.” 

“Of course. I’ll take care of you.” 

He says it with such finality, such assurance, like it’s his one mission in life. She starts weeping again. 

_ “Dammit,”  _ he mutters under his breath and then shuffles closer to where she’s curled up in her chair. He crouches down beside her, hands stretched out like he might rest them on her shoulders. His fingers curl and flex before he drops his hands to rest against his knees. “What did I say to upset you?” He says it so softly, like she is a skittish kitten. The thought makes her laugh. 

“Nothing. I’m just—I’m just a mess right now. Sometimes when I start crying the waterworks don’t wanna turn off for a while.” 

“This gonna last the whole week?” he asks, trepidation clear in his tone. 

Something about the look on his face makes her chuckle. She shakes her head, messy curls brushing around her shoulders. “Nah, just the first couple days.” 

“You’ll tell me if I mess up, right? So I know when it’s my fault and when it isn’t?” Blue. His eyes are so damn blue and  _ earnest.  _ They make her ache inside, looking up at her from where he’s crouched down beside her chair. 

She nods at him, her throat suddenly too tight for speech. He’s close, so close to her and she notices his breathing has synced with hers. She wonders how often that happens between them. His eyes roam her face and an emotion she can’t quite name passes over his features. 

“C’mere,” he mutters and then he’s lifting the corner of his flannel shirt and gently drying the tears that have run down her cheeks and throat. He’s careful not to let his skin touch hers, keeping the fabric between them with each stroke. “There,” he says, gaze assessing. “No more waterworks.” 

“For now.” Darcy gives a self deprecating grin, rolling her eyes at her soggy tendencies. 

***

Darcy is expecting a passenger ship. 

It is  _ not _ a passenger ship. 

Bucky ushers her onto a massive cargo ship that looks much too large to be manned by such a small crew, but Bucky assures her these rigs regularly are run by no more than a dozen or so men. 

At least all the crew members seem like decent men. She was half expecting men who look a bit more like pirates and less like someone’s dad. But, she supposes, they have to feed their families. What’s the harm in keeping quiet about taking on two passengers when it means they have an extra five grand to send back to their wives and children? 

One of the crewmen, Nabil, gives them a brief tour of the ship. He and Bucky are speaking in rapid fire French as the tour proceeds and her minimal education in foreign languages affords her the ability to understand about every fourth or fifth word. Mostly she just smiles and nods and uses her observational skills to figure out what each stop on the tour is for. As far as she can tell, they’ve been shown the common areas for the crew members. A kitchen, a cafeteria of sorts, something that looks possibly like a game room? At last he brings them to their cabin. 

It’s not much to look at but beggars, and illegal travelers, can’t be choosers. The room holds a bed, a desk with a chair, and a small bench running under a single window. There’s a door off to one side that she assumes leads to the bathroom. Bucky shakes Nabil’s hand and the other man nods his head at Darcy, a friendly smile in place as he excuses himself to attend to his duties. Probably. She really is guessing at about 80% of what is being said. When Bucky closes the door to the cabin behind him and sets their bags in the middle of the single bed, Darcy’s stomach sinks like a stone. 

“We’re both staying here?” 

He doesn’t look at her. “Yes. This is the only space the Captain has left.” He meets her gaze. “Don’t worry about sleeping arrangements. You take the bed at night and I can catch a nap during the afternoons. I don’t need much sleep to function.” 

She eyes the bed and then him warily. A couple hours of sleep a day for two weeks seems like a recipe for disaster. “You sure?” she asks. 

He just grunts and nods at her. 

“Alright, then,” she mutters. The motion sickness patch behind her ear itches and she scratches at it delicately. So far the patch is working splendidly and like hell is she going to risk accidentally scraping it off. 

They leave port within the hour. She watches the coastline shrink to nothing from their cabin window. It’s an eerie feeling being out at sea with nothing but endless miles of blue in every direction. It makes her heart skitter and her blood fizz in her veins. A large hand clamps on her shoulder, breaking her from her reverie. 

“What’s wrong?” 

Bucky is leaning toward her from his spot on the bed where he’s been dozing. He looks a little wild, his eyes darting here and there like he’s looking for some kind of threat. She scrunches her nose in confusion and shakes her head. “Nothing?” 

“Then why do you...why do I feel you…? You feel scared. Anxious.” His eyes are pinning her in place again. 

She flicks her tongue out over dry lips and shakes her head. “It’s nothing. Just being out in the middle of the ocean. It makes me feel...I dunno. What’s the opposite of claustrophobic? Everything feels too big, too endless, without land. Makes me feel...off.” 

He blinks at her and then nods in understanding, some of the tension leaking out of him. “You gonna be alright?” 

She nods and his palm glides over her shoulder blade. He pats her awkwardly before letting the hand drop to his side. Darcy releases a slow breath as he lays back on the bed again, rolling to his side and facing away from her. Her eyes linger over the lines of his body before drifting back to the window and the endless blue. These days, her whole world is being swallowed up by endless blue.


	8. It's a Chemical Reaction, That's All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a good time, find me on tumblr- holdmecloseandfast.tumblr.com

Their days aboard the cargo ship settle quickly into a sort of routine. It’s not exactly a cruise ship, so there is very little entertainment to be had, but Darcy finds it where she can. Mainly in pestering the crew members with her bits of broken French and charades. They humor her, for the most part, and she hopes her antics are a welcome distraction. Their grins seem to be evidence of it. 

Of the crew members, Nabil is the most fond of her stilted conversation. He’s maybe a few years her elder with heavy, square hands that look as rough and ruthless as rock but deep brown eyes that crinkle sweetly when he smiles, which is often. In the empty afternoons when he has little work to do and Bucky takes his daily nap, they take to playing card games, that she only barely understands the rules of, in the game room. Sometimes other members join them, sometimes they sit next to her and try to give her pointers on how to win. She assumes. There is much that is lost in translation. 

When he’s not spanking her at Moroccan card games, Nabil is showing her pictures on his phone of his family back home. He’s very proud of them and it’s a heartwarming thing to watch him kiss the little faces of his three daughters on the screen. She’s seen him stroke the image of his heavily pregnant wife on several occasions and it sets off something fond and wistful in her breast. 

“You miss them?” she asks. 

“Ouais, yes,” he nods, pressing his hand to his heart.  “Much.” 

She smiles at him and reaches across the table between them to pat his wrist. “They’re beautiful,” she says sincerely. “Jolie.”

His grin is a bright crack gleaming from dark, element-roughened skin and he looks as if he is glowing with happiness. He nods emphatically, in total agreement with her, and then gestures towards her. “You?” he asks. She isn’t sure what he’s indicating until he flicks his fingers in the general direction of her cabin where Bucky is sleeping and back towards her again. “Les enfants? You and Barnes?” 

Darcy’s eyes go wide and she chokes a bit over her own words, shaking her head swiftly enough to give herself whiplash. “No. No children. We aren’t...” she falters, trying to figure out how to explain that she and Bucky are only friends and barely that. She combs her brain for the right words in French. “Barnes...il est mon ami.”

Nabil shakes his head at her, frowning. He points at a spot over his heart. “Lien de coeur?”

The blood drains from Darcy’s face and she feels her stomach drop. She might have an abysmal memory of her high school French classes but that is one phrase that she could never forget. How could she when she was still so hopeful over her soulmate at the time? She had found the French translation for soulbond to be so deeply romantic in that way that only teenage girls can be romanced. Darcy had coveted the information, delving into the differences and similarities in the way the French treated soulbonds and loving every single tidbit of information. 

Now she is left to wonder how Nabil could possibly know of her bond with Bucky. She certainly hadn’t brought it up and she highly doubted Bucky would have mentioned it. Nabil notices her panic and his confusion morphs to concern. He leans towards her, reaching for her shoulder but she jerks back out of his reach. 

“Who told you that?” she asks more harshly than she intended. “How did you know that?” 

Nabil shakes his head, not understanding her. His eyes glance up at something behind her just as a warm, familiar hand settles on her shoulder. She resents the fact that Bucky’s touch immediately calms the panicky feeling in her chest. He pulls out the chair next to her and sits, leaning close to murmur in her ear. 

“It’s alright. He recognized us for what we are the first day after watching us together.” 

Darcy turns her head and squints at Bucky, still not convinced that something hinky isn’t going on. Bucky is nearly nose to nose with her, his arm curved over the back of her chair. He leans back and directs a line of French at Nabil, who has been watching them intently. Nabil makes a noise of understanding and responds to what Bucky said and then turns his attention to her.

“Darcy,” he says gently drawing her eyes from the soothing line of Bucky’s jaw. Nabil points at his heart and then pulls at the collar of his shirt to reveal a line of French tattooed across his left pectoral in a pretty script. Darcy meets his eyes again with sharp surprise. 

“You too?” she asks, recognizing the traditional French custom of soulmate pairs tattooing themselves with their first words to each other. Her teenage self had positively swooned at that little factoid. In all honesty, she still finds it terribly romantic. 

Nabil grins softly at her, a small, private gleam of understanding in his eyes. He’s the first person she’s ever befriended that shares a soulbond with someone and she’s instantly fascinated and filled with questions. Her curiosity is cut through with irritation when she realizes that the language barrier would be, well, a barrier to getting her answers. Her gaze snaps to Bucky and she tugs at his jacket. 

“Translate for me,” she demands. 

Bucky cocks his head at her and raises a brow. “Say please.” 

She narrows her eyes at him and purses her mouth. “Translate for me. Now.” 

His face shifts into a grin and she feels his thumb brush absently against her back. “What do you want me to say?”

And thus begins a friendly interrogation for the better part of an hour until Nabil, laughing at her eagerness, has to excuse himself to return to his duties. With him gone, a pensive silence settles over them both. The same thing seems to be niggling at them and Bucky voices it first. 

“They’re so happy.” He pauses. “Do you ever...do you ever wish we had met like normal soulmates? Do you think we could have been happy?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers into the space between their bodies. His eyes are too open, expression too vulnerable, for her to meet them in that moment. As is her wont, she deflects the emotional moment with a little levity. “We might be a fucked up pair, but at the very least you’re painfully attractive. So silver lining and all that.” 

He meets her crooked grin with disbelief. “You think nothing but a pretty face is enough to constitute a silver lining?”

“Hey, I’ve been in relationships for worse reasons,” she teases. He does not take it the way she expects. 

“You’ve…? You’ve been with other people? Even though you knew you had a mate?”

Darcy’s brows draw together in confusion. “Yeah? Things are little different these days, grandpa. Bonded pairs aren’t expected to abstain from casual relationships while waiting for their soulmate to show up.” She quirks a brow up at him in open, if good natured, accusation. “And it’s not like you haven’t been having your own fun this past year, buddy.”

Bucky stares at her in confusion. “What? I haven’t been with a dame since before…well since before I can remember. And certainly long before you were born.” 

Darcy rolls her eyes. “Barnes, there’s no shame in it, I don’t judge. And there’s no point in lying because I  _ felt  _ it. A lot. It’s been like a biweekly occurrence since February. And that’s only the times I was tuned into you. I don’t even wanna know about all the times that I missed out on.”

“Oh.” Bucky leans back in his seat slowly and crimson creeps across the skin at his collar. “Um. That--it’s not what you think.”

“Uh huh.”

“Honest, it wasn’t--I wasn’t…” he cuts off with a frustrated growl. “I was alone, okay?”

“Oh. Oh!” Darcy bites her lips together in an effort to keep from laughing at him. It’s a futile effort. “Damn dude,” she cackles. “You gone blind yet?”

Bucky drags his hands over his bright red cheeks. “Dammit woman, don’t laugh at me,” he commands, voice surly. 

This has the opposite effect and only sends her into further hysterics that show no signs of stopping. Bucky sighs and reaches for her wrists, pulling her up from where she’s bent double in her chair so that she can look at him. 

“Please? Don’t make fun of me, doll, please?” he begs softly, blue eyes vulnerable again. “That...doing  _ that,  _ it’s the first time in a really long time that my body has given me anything that feels  _ good.  _ First time it’s not just being used to hurt me or control me.” His mouth snaps shut with an audible click of his teeth and he turns his head to look away from her. 

Her laughter peters out and she straightens, her wrists slipping from his loose grip. Her eyes go wide and her stomach flips with the realization that she is a truly horrible human being. “Oh. Oh god,” she murmurs in horror. 

“Yeah.”

“I’m _so_ sorry.” 

Bucky shrugs and rises from his chair, still not looking at her. “Don’t worry about it. You didn’t know.” He stalks out of the room without a backward glance. 

She doesn’t see him again for the rest of the day. It’s only when she’s exiting the little bathroom attached to their cabin, having finished putting on her pajamas and brushing her teeth, that she sees him. He’s seated on the bench below their window, staring out across the wine-dark ocean with one foot on the floor and the other on the bench, his forearm resting across the top of his knee. His hands are free of the gloves he wears when in public and she feels vaguely voyeuristic to seem them bare. He glances at her for a fleeting second as she crawls into the bed but doesn’t say anything. 

Since his eyes are conveniently avoiding hers in favor of the view outside, she feels comfortable laying on her side and watching him. His face looks more haggard than she’s seen it since the night she met him. The purple circles under his eyes are so pronounced she can see them even in the moonlight streaming through the window. 

“What?” he asks suddenly, surly attitude firmly in place, eyes still pointedly looking out the window. 

“You look tired."

He shrugs one shoulder. “‘M fine.”

Darcy sighs because she already knows what’s about to come out of her mouth and she wishes she could stop the words but she knows that she’s already too soft for this man to do that. “Get in bed, Bucky.” 

Predictably, that does capture his attention and his head snaps around. He eyes her with suspicion. “What?”

She rolls her eyes and scoots back until she’s nearly flush with the wall. “You’ve only had an hour or two of sleep for the last four days. Get in the bed. You need actual sleep.”

Surly again, he shakes his head. “I’m functional.” 

“Oh my god, Barnes. You’re exhausted. Get in the goddamn bed.” 

He eyes her, jaw working over the words he wants to say. “It’s not a very big bed. I don’t wanna accidentally touch you while I’m asleep.” 

She nods, because this is definitely a valid concern and they are both still very wary of the megamindmeld situation. She looks down at herself, taking in her pajama pants and loose v-neck t shirt, and then scoots back out of bed. “The less skin we have exposed, the less likely we’ll have issues. You don’t happen to have a onesie in your bag, do you?” She doesn’t wait for a response. She pulls a long sleeved shirt from her bag along with a pair of socks and heads towards the bathroom to change. 

When she returns, he’s got a similar ensemble on and is standing in the middle of the room. He’s holding himself strangely, like he’s uncomfortable in his own skin, and shooting skittishes glances in her direction. Tension pulls at her shoulders so she ignores him and crawls back in bed. Her nose is practically touching the wall in her effort to create as much space as possible for his bulk. She waits, her breath puffing and condensing against the wall, until finally she feels the mattress give behind her and Bucky settle in. 

They’re both so rigid the bed nearly vibrates with it. They don’t speak. They don’t move. By some miracle they finally fall asleep in that miserable little bunk. 

***

Darcy wakes to the truly unpleasant sensation of being choked. Her eyes snap open and her hands are already scrabbling at the unrelenting flesh hand wrapped around her throat. She can still breathe, but barely, and she is fully panicking, twisting and kicking at him. He murmurs angrily in slurred Russian and she is certain he is asleep and someplace that she can’t reach. The harder she struggles, the tighter he grips her throat and she loses hope with each new second. Her vision is starting to gray and blur at the edges when she has the fleeting thought to go limp and play dead. 

Darcy on the brink of oxygen starvation is apparently a genius, because the moment she goes completely lax against him, the grip at her throat loosens. With every ounce of discipline she has, she draws a slow, quiet breath. She’s terrified that if she gulps down air like she wants to, she’ll alert him to her very much alive status and she’d be right back where she started. 

The Russian mumbling continues but his grip stays loose. Eventually he grows silent behind her and his breathing steadies. She continues her deep, controlled breathing, listening to her pounding heart slow. He’s curled around her back, his legs tangled with hers and his hand resting flat and heavy against the base of her throat. She’s tempted to move his arm and escape the bed altogether but she’s worried disturbing him could prove disastrous. She does her best to fall back asleep and almost succeeds until the hand at her throat spasms and shifts down to palm her left breast. 

She can’t tell if this is better or worse than him trying to murder her in her sleep. She stares blankly at the wall in front of her face and then rolls her eyes with a weary sigh. Carefully, she reaches up and tugs at his wrist until his hand is cupped around her ribcage just below her breast. She’s still technically spooning with him and the position is far more intimate than she cares for but she assumes this is as good as it is going to get for the moment and likely couldn’t get worse. 

She is a fool. 

The arm around her tightens and she is being pulled tight into Bucky’s chest. There’s not a goddamn inch of space to be found between their bodies. To make matters even more terribly uncomfortable, Bucky starts murmuring again, this time directly into her ear. He’s switched from his earlier Russian to the soft, lilting syllables of French now. It sounds significantly less aggressive which she takes as a good sign, right up until he begins nuzzling at her hair and neck, his lips moving across her skin. 

It’s not a crisis, per se, but it’s not exactly how she was planning on spending her night. 

The murmuring, and the fucking  _ nuzzling,  _ cease at last but anytime she tries to create space between them, he hauls her back into his chest. Darcy doesn’t consider herself a quitter but she’s so tired and just  _ done  _ with the night, she decides to cut her losses and just go the fuck to sleep. She is just on the edge of it, her mind wandering aimlessly right at the brink of dreaming, when a realization crashes over her and effectively ends her attempt at sleep. 

With all the choking and the struggling and the nuzzling, there hasn’t been a single instant of her experiencing the inside of his head. No mindmeld. Not even their normal soulbonded peeks into the other person’s mind. She blinks rapidly, puzzling through this realization for a moment. Hesitantly, she reaches up to stroke a finger over the back of his hand. When nothing happens, she does it again, this time slipping her finger under the hem of his sleeve and over the fine hairs that cover his forearm. She frowns and presses her entire palm to his skin. Still nothing. 

She thinks back to the moment when they had shook hands and gotten whammied by their bond. A thought occurs to her and she traces the pad of her finger over the back of his hand and then tucks it to press to the center of his palm. As soon as she does, she feels the weight of his mind settle over hers. 

This time it is far less chaotic, with a distant, hazy quality to his emotions. She can only assume it’s because he’s asleep. She moves her finger out from under his hand. It may not be as disorienting this time around, but it is still quite a lot to handle for a prolonged time. She plays around with his hand and a few theories of how their mindmeld works, eventually figuring out that they essentially have to be palm to palm to create the effect. Any other place they touch, nothing remotely significant happens. She’s playing with his fingers (pad to pad works too) when he tenses behind her and shakes his hand under her grip, flicking away her curious fingers. 

An irritated breath puffs against her neck, stirring her hair and tickling her skin. “Stop fiddlin’ with my hand,” he mumbles into her ear. 

She goes still, her nerves prickling at being caught out. He doesn’t move or speak again for a solid minute and she realizes he’s not really conscious. Relief floods her and she relaxes into him. His sleeping body seems to like that because a warm rumble of contentment stirs in his chest. In an instant his lips are back on the skin of her neck. 

It’s not nuzzling this time. No, she’s not that lucky. It’s slow, lazy, close-mouthed kisses that are lighting up the nerve endings along her spine. 

_ “Baby,”  _ he whispers across her flesh, sending goosebumps up her neck and clear across her scalp. 

She fights the sudden urge to yield more skin to his searching lips. Instead, she turns her face into the pillow, muffling the frustrated squeak she makes. The motion creates a much yearned for space between them, enough to let her hair fall across and cover her skin. 

He’s back to the nuzzling and mumbling nonsense into the hair at the back of her head. He  takes several deep, shuddering inhales, breathing her in, before settling into a deeper sleep and going still again. 

She wants to scream and cry because being held and touched like this by him feels so damn  _ good  _ but she doesn’t  _ want it to.  _ It’s a complication she’s not prepared for. An intimacy that she isn’t comfortable craving. 

She lays there for long hours in a special kind of misery, torn between what she  _ craves  _ and what she’s told herself she wants. 

***

Bucky wakes in the early hours of the morning, flat on his back with Darcy’s forearm flung across his face. The sting along the bridge of his nose gives him the impression that her arm over his face is a recent and not entirely gentle movement. Carefully, he grips her arm and folds it back down over her belly. 

She’s shoulder to shoulder with him, her head tilted back on the pillow and lips slightly parted, looking like the embodiment of innocence. A lock of her dark hair bisects her face, rustling with each puff of air from her mouth. Unthinking, he reaches out to sweep the strand of hair back with gentle fingers. The warm give of her skin under his fingertips is unsurprisingly pleasant. 

He lets his fingers linger, enjoying this little piece of her. It feels a little bit like stealing, but the kind of stealing that keeps you from starving during hard times. There’s no malice in it--only need. 

He jerks his hand back when he remembers why he’s not supposed to be touching her in the first place, then stares in bewilderment at his fingertips. Slowly, he presses them back to the softness of her cheek, confused when nothing happens. Their soulbond is silent. 

He doesn’t understand why this time is different, but he doesn’t question it. The phrase “never look a gift horse in the mouth” bizarrely comes to mind. He strokes across her cheek one last time with the back of his knuckles then withdraws his hand, letting it come to rest on his chest. 

***

Darcy wakes up alone and counts it a blessing. She doesn’t even want to know what position they were tangled up in when Bucky woke up that morning. He never mentions it and neither does she. 

When night falls again, she wordlessly slides to the wall, creating space for him.

She wonders if she is an idiot or just a glutton for punishment. She concludes that she is both... but she doesn’t change her stance on sharing her bed. Even with the interrupted and lessened sleep she’d had the night before, she feels more rested than she has in  _ ages.  _ It’s not just a physical need for sleep suddenly met, there’s a peacefulness to her that wasn’t there the day before. 

And she can tell she isn’t the only one benefitting from their night in such close quarters. The whole day Bucky has looked refreshed in way that is more than skin deep. He’s smiled more that day than all the others with her combined. 

He slides in behind her, leaving a careful chasm between their bodies. It’s a futile, if thoughtful, gesture. She wakes in the morning tucked fully in his embrace, her nose pressed to the center of his chest. They’re both sticky with sweat and far too overdressed for having so much body heat in such a small space. 

She peels herself away from him and the movement causes him to stir. He grumbles something at her, and rolls away. He sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, and then sits for a moment with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. His hair sticks damply to the back of his neck. He literally shakes the lingering sleepiness from his head and leaves for the bathroom. 

They say nothing about the unbidden intimacies of their new sleeping arrangement....but they don’t exactly do anything to prevent them either. 

As a consequence of their marked silence on the entire thing, neither one of them mentions the new knowledge of the workings of their soulbond in regards to  _ touch-- _ a topic that is much too messy in its implications. 

It becomes their pattern, going to bed together and pretending like they don’t end up cuddled together every single time. They don’t talk about how  _ right _ it feels to be snuggled up together either. They may be in abject denial of the magnitude of their soulbond but their bodies are under no such constraints. And there is no denying the calming effect it has on Bucky’s psyche. His mind feels less scattered with each night they spend in each other’s arms. 

The only change to their nightly routine comes when Darcy comes to bed in a tank top and a pair of oversized cotton shorts. Bucky’s sitting at the desk in his customary long sleeved henley and flannels, reading a book he’s borrowed from one of the crew members, when he looks up to see her. The book slips from his hands to slide to the floor with a thump. 

Darcy’s hackles go up at the question in his eyes. “Look, your body puts off more heat than an industrial furnace. If I have to wake up in another pool of my own sweat, I’m going to lose my shit,” she deflects. 

He looks like he wants to ask her a question but he never does. His mouth closes and he nods sharply and begins to pull his shirt over his head. He starts to shuck off his pajama pants and Darcy turns away to slide beneath the covers before she can see what kind of underwear he prefers. 

She listens as he clicks off the lamp on the desk. The room goes dark, cut through with only the barest glimmer from the stars outside their little window. She is unable to quash an instinctual sigh of contentment when he lays down next to her. She hopes it is too soft for him to notice but knows the odds of that are slim considering his enhanced hearing. They lay in strained silence until she feels his arms come around her. He pulls her to his chest and his bare legs brush the back of hers. She tenses and turns her head to find him wide awake and staring intently at her. 

“We’re gonna end up like this anyway,” he says, resigned. She shrugs, because he’s right, and settles back into him, pillowing her head against his arm. They’ll be in Brazil in three days’ time. She can endure the neediness of their soulbond for a couple more nights. 


	9. Runaway Baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Playing games and neither one knows the rules.

Darcy licks the salt from her lips as she peers at the hazy, blue horizon. Nabil assured her at breakfast that the coast of Brazil is but a few short hours away, but standing at the railing, all she can see for miles is the neverending Atlantic. She sighs and leans both forearms against the railing, more bored than anything else. With plans to make land by nightfall, the crew has literally gone into “all hands on deck” mode, with everyone busy fulfilling their crewman duties. 

This leaves Darcy to her own devices, which is fine but not ideal. She could potentially entertain herself by chatting with Barnes...if she could only find him. She pulls away from the railing, her thoughts heavy with the man in question as she begins to meander through the rows and rows of stacked shipping containers. She drags her fingers along the side of one of the containers, occasionally rapping her knuckles against the metal. 

She doesn’t know what to think of him. He’s handsome in a way that is almost painful; too pretty to be ignored, though she tries. Oh how she tries. But his physical attributes aside, he’s softer than she thought he would be. His voice, even when he is irritated, is far gentler than she thought it would be. And his hands, when he holds her at night they are perhaps his softest part of all, which is counterintuitive considering that one of those hands is actually made of metal. It’s all counterintuitive. He’s a hardened killer, an assassin, and before that he was a soldier. He shouldn’t be so goddamn soft, but he  _ is _ and how exactly is she supposed to keep a firm grip on her soulbond when all she wants to do is melt into all that softness?

Darcy scrubs her hands over her face. It’ll get easier once they’re off this damn boat and able to sleep in separate beds, separate rooms again, she assures herself repeatedly. 

A creak of metal draws her from her circular thoughts and she cranes her neck, looking for the source. She finds none, but the eerie feeling of being watched creeps between her shoulder blades. 

“Nabil?” she calls and then, tentatively, “Barnes?”

Her steps pick up slightly and she rounds the corner of one of the shipping containers only to run smack dab into the middle of Bucky’s chest. 

“Gotcha,” he says around a grin, hands coming down to fold over her shoulders. 

She pushes away from him, slapping his hands away. “Dammit, Barnes, you scared the crap out of me. What are you doing skulking around here for?”

“Same reason as you, most likely. Looking for something to do.” He levels a look at her that is equal parts playful and assessing. She does not care for it one bit and swallows back on a sudden sense of foreboding. “You wanna play a game, Darcy?”

“Okay I can’t tell if you’re quoting horror movies to creep me out or you genuinely want to play a game.” She crosses her arms over her chest and backs up a little bit further from him, her back coming to rest against the container behind her. “Based on the look on your face I’m guessing it’s the latter.”

He hums thoughtfully. “I was thinking we could play hide and seek?”

She just stares at him for a moment. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“You wanna play hide and seek with me?  _ Why?” _

“Something to do…” he begins, then trails off, not quite meeting her eyes. “You’re not very, uh, stealthy. If you’re gonna be with me...near me, I’d like to train you a little bit so you can get yourself to safety if necessary.”

Darcy arches a brow, cocking her head slightly to the side. “Safety from whom? Hydra...or you?”

He swallows once, his face going dark, and then shrugs. “Either, or. Both.” 

He looks deeply uncomfortable, to the point that it’s starting to bleed over to her through association and a little bit through their soulbond. She decides to take pity on him. “Alright,” she says. “You count first.” 

He looks at her and he seems a little bit lost so she tugs at his jacket, pulling him closer to her and consequently the container at her back. She moves around him, pressing between his shoulder blades until he is almost flush to the container. “You gotta count, Barnes. This is your idea, remember?” she teases. “Don’t you remember the rules?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles. “I’ll give you to the count of thirty.” He turns to press his face into the metal, cupping his hands on either side of his face as he begins to count. 

Darcy backs up a couple paces before turning and dashing away. “No peeking!” she calls out behind her, the hint of laughter at the edge of the words. 

Something about the childhood game is familiar and comforting and a hell of a lot of fun. She finds her troubled mood from earlier quickly dissipating as she zig zags down the orderly columns and rows, getting as far from Bucky as she can. She reaches the end of one row and crouches down, conscious of her heavy breathing. 

From a distance, she can hear Bucky calling out the final set of numbers and then shouting, “Ready or not, here I come!” 

She bites down on the smile trying to crawl across her lips. There is something so strange and yet so charming about the game they are playing. She is still crouched and wondering how long it will take him to find her when she feels herself abruptly drawn up by the collar of her jacket. She wriggles, twisting around to see who has her.

“Gotcha, again,” Barnes says with a smirk. He’s still got his hand fisted in her jacket and he’s holding her aloft to the point where her toes are scraping against the ground. She twists and jerks away from his grasp. 

“Dammit, that was fast, you cheated!” she accuses, jabbing a finger into his bicep. The flesh one, thankfully. 

His smirk grows to a full grin. “It’s not cheating if I can hear you clomping around from a mile a way. You gotta be lighter on your feet.” 

She rolls her eyes at him but he just winks at her--the audacity!--and motions to the container. 

“Your turn,” he says and then takes off like a shot. Darcy only counts to twenty because she has no qualms with cheating herself and she’s at a bit of a handicap anyway. 

After fifteen minutes of searching for him she throws her hands in the air and gives up. “Olly olly oxen free, Barnes! I give up! Where the hell are you?”

She shrieks when he leaps down directly in front of her. 

“You’re not very good at this game Darcy. How bout we play something different? Maybe tag?”

Darcy nods thoughtfully for a second and then flings her hand out, slapping his chest. “You’re it!” she screeches and then takes off at a mad dash. She hurtles around corners and down rows and then peeks behind her, only to find that Barnes is not in pursuit. In fact, he’s nowhere to be seen. That’s of course when he steps out from between two containers to snatch her around the waist. 

“You gotta be quieter Darcy. And faster,” he murmurs, nearly nose to nose with her. He’s smiling devilishly and she’s panting heavily in his arms and it feels....exhilarating. Before she can decide what she wants to do with that knowledge, he drops her back to her feet. 

“Again,” he commands, giving her a little boost away from him.

“That’s not the rules, I’m supposed to be it now.” 

“You’d never catch me, Lewis. Besides, you won’t learn anything chasing after me. I need you to get better at running and hiding from me.”

“I ran as fast as I could,” she replies mulishly. 

“You can’t just run flat out and think that will be enough. You need to be aware of your surroundings at all times. Not just what’s behind you, but all around. I shouldn’t have been able to get the drop on you. Now, again.” His tone brooks no room for argument so she starts off at a jog in the opposite direction with a slight groan. 

She tries to keep his advice in mind, keeping her head on a swivel, always looking for him around every corner. He still catches her unawares, this time coming from behind to snatch her up against his chest. 

“Tag, you’re dead,” he says softly in her ear. 

She shivers, from the proximity and his message. “Yeah, yeah. I’m bad at this game too.”

“You lasted a little longer this time. Not by much, but longer. Next time, you need to be more alert to sound, not just sight. Use all your senses. Got it?”

“Got it,” she growls, her pride a little worse for wear. Then she takes off again. 

She lasts significantly longer this time, sensing him on several occasions and changing her course to avoid him. Then he leaps down from above her and she only barely escapes the sweep of his arms, twisting her body midstride with more agility than she thought she was capable of. 

“Good!” she can hear him call out at she dashes away again, and she stifles a pleased smile. She is so damn pleased with herself that she accidentally corners herself in a dead end between three shipping containers, with Bucky looming in the only exit. He darts at her and she tries to feint to the side, but he’s too fast and she has to back pedal to avoid colliding with him. He’s grinning like mad and slowly backing her into the corner until he’s right in front of her, caging her between the container and his body, his hands planted on either side of her shoulders. 

“Much better,” he pants. “You’re still dead, but at least you made it long enough where you could have probably gotten help or somewhere to hide if you weren’t trapped on a boat.”

“Good to know,” Darcy gasps, nodding. “You don’t have to tell me twice to never get on another boat ever again.” 

Bucky huffs a soft laugh, his breath brushing against her chin and lips. Unconsciously she darts her tongue out to swipe over her lips. The movement catches his eyes and that heady rush she’d felt when he caught her earlier returns. Darcy thinks it must be the adrenaline that’s thrumming through them both that is making her want to...to...do something foolish. She ducks her head, hiding her face from him under the guise of wiping sweat from her brow. The moment passes and the tension dissolves as Bucky pulls away from her. 

“You’re a quick learner,” he comments, planting his hands on his hips. “That’s good. There’s lots of things I can teach you that I think you’ll pick up really well.”

Darcy pinches her lips into a tight smile, nodding and hoping the line of thought that her brain has taken isn’t bleeding over through their bond. “Cool. I could stand to pick up a few new skills. Keeps me sharp and...stuff.” 

They part awkwardly and she doesn’t see him again until they make port and he joins her on deck with their bags thrown over his shoulder. 

 

***

 

São Paulo is a nice enough city and Darcy likes it just fine, which is good be cause they spend an entire month there while Bucky puts things in place for their extended stay in South America. She’s not sure what all he’s doing but it mostly seems to be garnering information and greasing palms and bringing home a car one afternoon that is more rust than vehicle. He claims that it will fill their needs just fine. Darcy is doubtful and chooses to walk to get around the city. 

Within the first five days that they are in São Paulo, Bucky finds them a little two bedroom apartment to stay in, paying for the month upfront. It’s not a particularly pretty apartment, but it’s fully furnished and in a decent--if aging--neighborhood. The kitchen is cramped and the living area is barely big enough to fit them both at the same time, and even then she practically has to sit in his lap. Needless to say, they don’t spend much time in that room together. 

Bucky gives her the larger of the two bedrooms, the one that connects directly to the bathroom. Darcy tells herself repeatedly in the first few days how pleasant it is to sleep alone again. Right up until the end of their first week living there and Bucky shares a nightmare with her so violent that she wakes shaking and twisted in her sheets.

She lays still, focussing on her heart thundering in her ears just to drown out the disturbing sounds of Bucky whimpering from the next room. Her heart eventually slows but Bucky’s distress grows louder. 

She buries her head under her pillow and comforter and squeezes her eyes shut so hard that she sees randoms patterns buzz across her vision. 

This pattern repeats for three nights in a row. In that time she’s barely slept and she finally hits her breaking point. She tiptoes to his room and stands uneasily in the doorway. His door is wide open, as it always is, and she can see the rumpled shape of him in his bed from the city lights streaming through his blinds. He’s on his belly, his bare back and shoulders bunching and rolling, his hands scrabbling at the mattress and the demons in his head. His guttural shouts are semi muffled into the bed. 

Darcy edges into the room, desperation crawling up her throat at seeing him-- _ feeling him-- _ like this. She scuttles forward the last few feet, closing the space between them until her knees are on the bed and she is suddenly crawling to him. She’s not even sure how she’s moved so quickly but she can’t stand another goddamn minute of this. 

Her hands are on his shoulders and she shakes him. It’s a stupid thing to do but she’s sleep deprived and heartsick and not at her best. He jerks under her hands and flips on his back faster than her eyes can catch in the dim light. Darcy is instantly aware that she’s about to be attacked so she does the only thing she can think of in the moment. 

She grabs his hands. 

She laces their fingers together even as Bucky reaches out to grab her, pulling her down and rolling her under his body. She holds tight, even with the onslaught of his deeply unsettled mind and her own rising panic. Whatever he’s receiving from her mind is enough to break through the nightmare he’s living. 

He flinches back, rising off her and settling back on his heels. He tries to pull his hands from hers but she doesn’t let him. She squeezes her eyes shut, tears slipping down into the hair at her temples. His breathing is harsh to her ears but he is otherwise silent. At least, outwardly he is. Inside his head, and subsequently hers, the world is burning and screaming. 

She tries not to let it overwhelm her. She fails and is sucked under the waves crashing against her. It takes her a few moments though, before she can feel her  _ self _ within the chaos. She grabs onto that thread of recognition and uses it to steady herself. She gathers her courage and quashes her panic, smothering the roil of her emotions and forcing calm out along their connection. The peace she creates spreads, grows, attaches to the burn of his mind and soothes it like a balm. 

“You can let go now.” His voice is rough, low, brushing over her skin like sheaves of wheat. 

He pulls his hands from hers as she opens her eyes and softens her grip. They stare at one another for several moments, eyes liquid in the dark. Darcy is the first to break. She raises her eyes to the ceiling and then back to his. “The second bedroom was a waste of money,” is all she says, rolling away from him and straightening the covers over herself. She settles down into the pillow, tucking her hands under her chin and waiting. 

“Yeah,” he breathes, and then sinks down behind her. 

The bed is twice the size of their bunk on the ship. 

The extra space is as irrelevant as the second bedroom. They’re still wrapped around each other when she wakes the next morning. Darcy wants to rip her hair out at how her body is betraying her, smugly happy at being back in his embrace. 

They’re on their sides, facing one another, with Bucky’s left arm curled beneath the pillow under her head. The skin of his chest is warm and smooth against her chin and lips and the tip of her nose. She fights the urge to nuzzle him. Bucky seems to be under no such constraint and buries his face into the mess of curls at the top of her head, his flesh hand sweeping down her spine to settle just above her ass. She tilts her hips forward and away from the hand but ends up nudging against something far more incriminating than a wandering hand. 

Of course, the situation worsens when he responds with a nudge back. And another. 

So far, her hands have been safely tucked under her chin, but with the third nudge, she slides her left hand out to catch his hip, barring any further  _ nudges,  _ god help her. This is when she realizes how truly frantic she must have been the night before to have completely missed the fact that Bucky  _ apparently _ slept in the nude when left to his own devices. Her thumb brushing the bare skin on the inside of his hip is what gives it away. She swallows and fights the urge to look, and then silently berates herself for even being tempted. 

But she is only human after all, and her soulmate is  _ beautiful  _ and technically specifically designed to be appealing to her and it’s been years since she’s been with a man so really it isn’t her fault that she looks. Fate has been conspiring against her since birth. 

Dear god, he is beautiful. 

Her grip on his hip involuntarily tightens, her fingertips pressing into the curve of his ass, and her thumb swipes once across his skin, causing the muscles to flex under her hand. 

“Your mama ever tell you it’s rude to stare?” His sleep roughened voice startles her and in her haste to remove herself from the unseemly situation she hurtles herself off the side of the bed. She lays on the carpeted floor, nursing a bruised ego and a carpet burn on one elbow, and stares at the ceiling, waiting to die of embarrassment. 

She lives, unfortunately, and Bucky’s head pops over the edge of the bed to peer down at her. His brow is tilted and he looks vaguely smug and amused. His bedhead is more adorable than it has any right to be. 

“I wasn’t staring,” she says stubbornly. 

“If you look for more than thirty seconds, it counts as staring.”

“My eyes were closed,” she lies, straight-faced. 

He cocks his head at her, gives a thoughtful, innocent expression, and then says, “Huh. Then I wonder what had you breathing so hard?” 

She groans and rolls over, hiding her face in the carpet. “Shut up, Bucky,” she barks. “It’s not my fault,” she adds as a muttered afterthought. 

“Oh?” She doesn’t know how he can fill a single syllable with such pointed disbelief, but he does it. 

“Yes,” she replies curtly and rolls back to face him. “I was surprised, is all. Shocked, even, because I wasn’t expecting you to be so….”

“Well-endowed?”

“What! God-- _ ” _ she groans and rolls her eyes, scrubbing her face with her hands. “I was gonna say  _ naked,  _ you asshole.” He grins at her and it’s boyish and shameless and she  _ hates  _ him in that moment for being so specifically attractive to her. 

“I was naked when you got in bed with me,” he says pointedly. 

“Yeah, but I was a little busy trying to help you out of a nightmare to realize it.” She rolls up to sitting and shields her eyes just in case there’s anything to be seen of him on the bed. Like a bare chest, an exposed thigh, the muscled slope of an asscheek.  _ Damnit.  _

She flees the room before he can respond, seeking refuge in the kitchen and letting the mundane task of cooking breakfast settle her nerves. 

 

***

 

He wears underwear to bed that night,  _ thank heavens, _ and every other night, for that matter. She stops even trying to sleep in her own bed anymore, just climbing into his whenever she’s ready to go to sleep, whether he’s already in bed or not. It’s their new normal. 

He’s starting to feel like home to her. 


	10. The Girl from Ipanema Goes Walking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Rio.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to ladyaudiophile. <333

After their month-long rental is up, Bucky loads them up into the car with their meager possessions and sends them barrelling up the highway to Rio de Janeiro. Darcy is somewhat disappointed that they didn’t stay put for another month or so; she’s growing tired of the migrant lifestyle. Fortunately, Rio has its own charms to help soften the blow of always being on the move. She is pretty jazzed about seeing that mega huge Jesus and spending her days on the beach getting a stellar tan. Well, stellar for her, which is about four shades darker than a glass of milk. A girl can dream. 

Bucky finds them another apartment, this one slightly nicer than the last. It’s a single bedroom and technically smaller than their previous apartment, but it has a lovely little terrace attached to the bedroom that faces the ocean and the building is directly on Ipanema beach. 

She leans against the wrought iron railing of the terrace as some strange feeling slips through her veins, salt laden wind playing at the ends of her hair. She glances over her shoulder back into the bedroom where Bucky is unpacking their bags. Or he was. The bags are half emptied on the bed but he’s standing still, just watching her. She feels a twist of apprehension and the tang of hope drip along their connection and she realizes what the odd look on his face is. 

“I love it,” she says fervently, gracing with him a true smile, forgoing her tendency to temper it with dry humor. 

He nods jerkily, tucking his chin to his chest and immediately returning to the bags. His hair swings around his face but not before she catches the grin flitting at the corner of his mouth. 

 

***

 

She loves Rio and never wants to leave. It’s just so damn _fun,_ which is something her life has been severely lacking for months, possibly years now. She enjoys wandering around the city and doing all the typical touristy things, occasionally accompanied, to her surprise, by Bucky, though it’s usually when she’s visiting some of the sketchier favelas. She quickly grows frustrated with the language barrier and picks up English to Portuguese and English to Spanish translation guides to aide her. She spends most of her evenings poring over the books and doing her damndest to pick up the languages.

Bucky comes home late one evening after running errands that she assumes are mildly illegal in nature to find her sitting cross-legged on their bed, surrounded by her translation guides and a package of Red Vines in her lap. She doesn’t notice he’s even entered the room until a bark of laughter shakes her from her deep concentration. She looks up sharply, brow furrowed as she tries to suss out what he’s laughing about. 

Bucky shakes his head in disbelief. “Doll, what is on your  _ face?” _

At his question her face goes lax and the Red Vine she’s had tucked between her top lip and her nose falls lamely into her lap. She blinks a few times, embarrassment coloring the tips of her ears. 

“Um. It’s my concentration mustache?” 

The man actually has the audacity to stifle a giggle.  _ “What?” _

She sighs and drops her voice into irritation to mask her embarrassment. “It’s a habit from my college days, okay? Red Vines are my study candy because I have a mild oral fixation so when I’m in deep concentration I have to keep my mouth busy or I will chew my lips, nails, pens, or whatever into shreds. Hence…concentration mustache.” The tail end of her sentence comes out timid under his wide eyed stare.  

Bucky crumples to the floor, completely lost to great heaving bursts of laughter. She screws up her face in irritation and makes to grab a pillow to hurl at him but stops when she’s hit with a wave of emotion from their connection. It crashes over her, so strong that her senses are overwhelmed with it. It tastes like sunshine and lemons, looks like the dappled pattern of sunlight through trees, sounds like joyous laughter, and feels like strong arms squeezing tight around her chest, the embrace of someone returning home after a long absence. 

She comes back to herself in a snap, having lost very little time at all. Bucky is still laughing on the bedroom floor, tears streaming down his face and it’s then that she is able to decipher what emotion he is bursting with. It’s genuine, unadulterated affection. It is warmth and tenderness and attachment without any of the ugliness that has tainted their association since the beginning. It’s such a pretty, pure thing that it takes her breath away and all she can do is grin helplessly down at him as his giggles finally peter out. 

He looks up at her from the floor, a grin to match hers. “Sweetheart, you’re something else, you know that?”

She’s smiling so big now it’s making her cheeks ache. “Yeah I know. And don’t you forget it.”

He rolls up to standing, chuckling softly. “Trust me, I couldn’t if I tried.” He settles on the mattress across from her, nodding at the pile of candy still in her lap. “You gonna share with your soulmate or what?”

The question startles her. They don’t say that word casually between them. Not ever. But perhaps they do now, she thinks as she hands him a sticky red rope. He takes it from her and gives it a curious glance before pulling a hunk off the end with his teeth. He grimaces, chewing it quickly before swallowing. 

“Nevermind. Too sweet. That tastes like shit,” he says, tossing the rest of the vine back into her lap.

Darcy gasps. “You take that back!”

“No. I stand by what I said. Those aren’t candy, they’re a new kind of torture. And I know torture.” 

Darcy reaches behind her for the pillow she’d abandoned earlier and thwacks him on the shoulder. “Blasphemer! Heretic!” she shrieks. 

When it comes to pillow fights, Darcy always fights dirty. However, not as dirty as Bucky Barnes, who has her pinned to the bed in less than five minutes and is joyfully stuffing Red Vines lengthwise between her teeth as an effective gag. Darcy curses at him through her candy gag and Bucky tilts his head to the side, cupping one ear.

“Sorry baby, what was that? Couldn’t quite hear you.” 

He eventually lets her up and her mouth and chin are a sticky red mess. His fingers haven’t escaped unscathed either, and he pops his flesh forefinger thoughtlessly between his lips as he heads into the bathroom. Darcy forgets to breathe when he makes a low rumble of pleasure around the digit before he closes the bathroom door.

Shaking her head, she scurries to the kitchen to clean herself up at the sink. Her hands are shaking under the stream of water and she doesn’t know why. 

 

***

 

Though Darcy has been very careful with her cash, she’s been slowly amassing a better wardrobe as their time in South America has gone on. It’s to the point that she breaks down and gets a decent luggage set, knowing that her dinky little duffle bag won’t be enough to carry all her possessions when they inevitably leave at the end of the month. The thought makes her sigh. 

She cheers herself up by buying a rather ostentatious bikini. It’s silver and spangly and  _ screams “ _ please look at my tits and ass” but it seems more fitting for the beach culture of Rio than the sensible black one piece she’s been wearing since they got there. In the harsh light of their bedroom, the new bikini seems to have shrunk, exposing far more flesh than it had in the dimly lit dressing room of the shop she’d bought it from. She turns to the side, gazing at her rear and chewing at her lip. She almost changes back into the black one piece until she remembers that she’s a total babe, kinda on the run, in a city that she likely will never see again, filled with people who don’t blink at near nudity in public. Instead, she tosses on her crimson cover up, plops her big floppy sun hat on her head and resolutely marches out to the living area. 

Bucky is sitting on the couch in front of the coffee table, obsessively cleaning some kind of gun for what is probably the thousandth time. It seems to be his form of entertainment and it makes Darcy mildly depressed. In a fit of insanity, she steps between him and the coffee table. It’s a tight fit so he has no choice but to look directly up at her. 

“There a problem, doll?” he asks, eyebrow cocked up and testing her suddenly thinning patience. 

“Yeah. You.” She plants her hand on her hips, her knees slotting between his. 

“Um...I’m sorry?”

“You should be. You’re the only person I know on this whole continent and you spend most of your time playing with your guns and not with me.”

“You want me to play with you?”

“Well, yeah,  _ kinda,”  _ she says with a hint of a whine. “Come to the beach with me.”

“You asking or telling?”

“Telling.” 

Bucky sighs and leans back into the couch, swiping a hand down his face. It happens to be the cybernetic hand and he holds it up to her, wiggling the fingers. “Kind of a dead give away, sweetheart. Not easy to hide this thing with the sun shining off it and blinding everyone nearby.”

“You can cover it up. Like you normally do.”

“And that won’t draw attention? Being fully clothed, including gloves, on a beach with mostly naked people.”

Darcy shrugs. “If anyone asks, you have a sun allergy. Or something. Besides, it’s the off season; hardly any people will be around.” At Bucky’s skeptical look she decides to bring out the big guns. She sits on one of his knees, leaning into him to grasp him by the front of his shirt.  _ “Please,”  _ she begs, leaning in so close that the brim of her hat brushes his forehead. “For me? Come have fun at the beach with me or I swear to god I will run away with the first decently attractive Brazilian man I see.” Bucky scowls at that and it makes her gut do a little flip. 

He grips her wrists, pushing her away and resettling her from his knee to the coffee table. “Fine.” 

He disappears into the bedroom, returning shortly decked out in fitted black workout clothes from neck to ankles and a pair of gloves on his hands. The slick fabric clings to him in appealing ways that Darcy firmly ignores. She cheerily grabs the beach bag she’d packed while waiting for him and shoves on a pair of sunglasses. 

“Perfect,” she crows. “Let’s go!” 

Bucky grumbles something she can’t quite hear, but dutifully follows her out of the apartment. 

 

***

 

Bucky is pleased that her assertion that there would be a lack of beach goers proves to be correct. Though, it’s still midmorning, so others might make their way to the beach later in the day. His fingers twitch restlessly at the wrist of his gloves and he follows Darcy to where a bright blue beach umbrella is planted in the sand between two equally blue, low seated chairs. She makes quick work of pulling towels from her outlandishly large beach bag, tossing him one to spread out over his chair as she tends to hers. She sinks into her chair with a happy sigh. She says something to him but he neglects to comprehend her words. The swath of red linen that she’s wrapped in has shifted, splitting to expose one of her legs in its entirety, and he is utterly lost to the gentle, milk-pale slope of her bare inner thigh. That is, until she reaches out to pinch his leg.  _ Hard.  _

“Hey, your mother ever teach you that it’s rude to stare?” Her left brow arcs just over the top of her oversized sunglasses. 

Bucky jerks his attention away from her legs, sinking into his chair, rubbing absently at the tender spot on his thigh. “Turnabout’s fair play,” he mutters and is mildly pleased to hear Darcy’s responding chuckle. 

The morning passes slowly and yet far too quickly at the same time. He expects a peaceful sort of silence to fall between them, as is their wont, but  is surprised when Darcy proceeds to fill the space between them with pleasant chatter. It’s fairly one-sided, but he finds it an entirely enjoyable experience despite that. Or perhaps because of it. He’s not much for talking these days. 

She starts out commenting on inane things, her voice a meaningless hum in the background as his eyes restlessly search the beach for eminent threat or recognition. In the span of an hour he sees only a handful of people, two boys no older than twelve chasing each other along the sand and an elderly couple out for a morning walk. He sinks further into his chair, his attention fuzzing slightly as he eases into perhaps enjoying his time with Darcy. 

She must sense it in him, when he’s finally ready to really listen to her. It’s then that she begins relating things about herself. At first, it seems to be a highlight reel of her life, where she was born (North Carolina), how many siblings she has (two brothers, both older), where she went to college, a brief overview of Thor derailing her life and following Jane Foster to the ends of the earth thereafter. She pauses when she mentions her and Foster’s move into Stark’s employment. Something leaves a bitter tang at the back of his throat and he doesn’t know if the guilt is coming from him or from her. 

She masks the hitch in the flow of her words by offering up a bottle of water from the depths of her giant bag. He graciously accepts it, his fingers brushing hers briefly. She returns to her storytelling, working her way backwards through her memories, giving him priceless insight into her life and into the woman who is, by all rights, his counterpart. She’s funny in a sharp, sarcastic way that reminds him of...well, it’s familiar. It makes sense that she would be so sharp-tongued in the first days that they’d known each other. Her words are a blade, keen enough to cut to the heart of the matter, be it for good or ill. It’s a strange thing, such a soft body hiding that cutting weapon. He finds that he likes the juxtaposition of her. Hell, he likes everything about her. 

She tells him stories about her adolescence, the silly things she was obsessed with in her girlhood. She stumbles over the memories she has of him, of feeling him and fearing for him. It’s painful to hear what he cursed her with when she was just a child, but he treasures the memories she shares just the same, tucking them close to his heart like jagged, precious gems. They cut him until he bleeds and he savors each sting. 

She tells him of her summers at Myrtle Beach as a little girl, spending blistering days playing in the sea with her brothers. The lighthearted stories stir his memory, moments rising murkily to the surface. He’s not said much to her the whole morning, shared nothing of his past, but this...he decides to share.

“When,” he clears his throat, gazing out over the cresting waves, “when I was a kid, we’d all go down to Cape May during the summers. My uncle had this big old Victorian house near the beach and we’d,” he huffs as some of his childhood antics grow a little clearer, “we’d run that town ragged, me and my sisters. Learned how to swim there...learned how to kiss there,” he admits, rubbing a hand over his mouth, shocked to find a grin there. 

“What was her name?” Darcy is smiling wickedly at him, sliding her glasses to the end of her nose. 

“Mary Alice Anderson.”

“Oh? She sounds like a fox.”

Bucky chuckles, “I certainly thought so at the time. She was vacationing with her family from Philly. I was twelve and she was fourteen and I thought I’d found heaven that summer.”

“Look at you with an older woman, you hussy.” 

A bark of laughter ripples through him. “That’s the exact same thing that--” his voice catches in his throat, his mirth snuffing out at the prickling pain in his head at just the thought of…

“Steve. That’s what Steve said,” he whispers, voice barely audible over the crashing waves. The vestiges of Hydra’s programming rip painfully at the edges of his brain and he shuts his eyes tight against it. He breathes through it, feeling it subside in tandem with the gentle stroke of Darcy’s warm hand along his forearm. When he opens his eyes, she withdraws her hand, letting it settle back into her lap as if she’d never touched him at all. He thinks that might hurt worse than the leftover programming. 

“He didn’t always come with us,” he starts again. “Sometimes he was too sickly or his Ma needed him to work to help with the rent, but it was always better when he got to come with us. I think the fresh air was good for his lungs. He wouldn’t cough so bad. And God knows the little Irish bastard needed the sun, he was so damn pale.”

Darcy is giggling and smiling at him and he’s smiling back and it feels like maybe he’s floating and maybe life has a few good things left for him. 

Comfortable silence descends between them. It’s a bit past noon by now and the heat is starting to settle in, sweeping away the coolness of the morning. Darcy is starting to glisten with a sheen of sweat and swipes at her brow. She’s restless for some reason now, twitching in her seat until she rises to her feet with an irritable sigh. He glances at her quizzically but his mouth goes dry as she begins to peel her red dress away, revealing far more of her than he’s ever seen. 

She’s a goddess made of moonlight and silver, come to torment him. He shifts in his chair, averting his eyes as she turns to bend over her bag. She tosses another bottle of water to him, which he only barely catches because his peripheral vision is so damn good. Next comes a sandwich that lands on his stomach because his eyes have snagged back onto her shimmering breasts. The top is small enough that he can see the jagged white lines of stretch marks smattered across the sides and tops of her breasts. He wants to trace each and every scar with his tongue. 

He jerks to his feet, marching stiffly towards the water, sandwich and water bottle left forgotten on his beach chair. Darcy makes an alarmed squawk, shouting after him, as he picks up speed.

“Dude, where are you going?”

“Swimming,” he shouts tersely over his shoulder, just before running full tilt into the breaking waves. When the water is up to his thighs, he dives in, taking quick frantic strokes and trying to drown the desire in his veins. He stops when the water is up to his neck and ducks down until he’s completely submerged.

He is an idiot. He is the universe’s fool. Nature’s bitch. 

She doesn’t want him, she’s made herself very clear on that. She’ll be his friend, and that’s all it can be. It’s all it  _ should be _ after everything he’s put her through just by being tied to her. He’s brought her nothing but suffering since the moment she was born, hurt her long before he ever met her. He doesn’t have the right to desire her, to want her so badly that his gut aches with it.

He can’t do this, this casual back and forth. The sharing of stories, enjoying each other’s company. Seeing her practically naked and dazzling in the sunlight. He doesn’t deserve it and he thinks it just might kill him to be so close to her but never have her. So he bundles it all up, all the  _ feelings _ and the  _ want _ and the  _ warmth,  _ he crushes it down, squeezes the humanity out until he’s cold inside. It’s a familiar place, this internal winter. He knows it well. It’s a place he can survive in. 

_ Kill the man, breathe life into the machine.  _

 

***

 

When Bucky’s head comes popping up out of the water, Darcy immediately knows something is wrong. He looks like an entirely different person, cold and closed off. It unsettles her. 

“Barnes, what the hell are you doing?” she shouts, smothering her rising panic. “The water is freezing!” She stands at the very edge, the waves lapping against her toes, sucking the sand out from beneath her feet as they retreat. 

He doesn’t answer her at first, his eyes dark and focused on some point behind her. He trudges towards her, stiff limbed, pausing briefly as he draws up beside her. 

“I’ve felt colder,” he says tersely, still not looking at her, his hair dark and dripping around his face. She watches his retreating back as he files past the beach chairs, heading directly toward their building. 

She wraps her arms tightly around herself, but it does nothing to soothe the burn of cold deep in her chest. 


	11. When She Walks, She's Like a Samba

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't hate me please.

Something is wrong with Barnes.

He is distant, cold to her like he hasn’t been since they first met. But even that early coldness held the heat of human desperation. Now there is nothing. He is a shell, hollowed out and yet walking around; the clockwork man. 

Darcy hasn’t a clue what to do. It scares her shitless. She’s tried to draw him out, engage him, but he looks at her with empty eyes.

He doesn’t hold her at night anymore. Is never there when she wakes. He’s a ghost in her bed.

Barnes is broken and she doesn’t know how to fix him. What’s worse is she isn’t even sure what caused him to break in the first place. 

It takes her a couple days, but eventually she realizes the detached feel of his mind is familiar. She knew it well as a child when he was still nothing but the Soldier. 

But the very worst of it, the most terribly dreadful part, is that she knows the coldness is not a facade. She can feel it through their bond sometimes, a neverending, echoing nothingness that chills her down to her marrow. She’s taken to taking scalding showers every time their bond randomly flares, if only to stop the shaking. 

When she realizes he’s descended into the Soldier again, she almost calls Steve. She’s worried for her own safety, worried that he’s been triggered somehow and that any minute a Hydra operative will come popping out of nowhere and command Bucky to murder her. Or worse yet, that Bucky will not care who she is and do it of his own volition. But he never feels menacing to her, never threatens her in anyway. He’s just...empty. 

By the end of the week her nerves are so frazzled with fear and frustration that she can’t handle another minute in his company. She’s washing dishes at the kitchen sink, all the while watching where he sits in the living room, unmoving. His eyes are focused on the wall, unblinking, his spine ramrod straight, his hands demurely hanging between his knees. He hasn’t even twitched since moving to the little loveseat after finishing dinner. 

A truly terrible anger rises up in her in that moment. It’s an ugly emotion, filled with grief and helplessness and fear, and it pushes her to do something incredibly rash, and not necessarily very kind. Her fingers spasm against the sudsy glass she’s holding and then she is hurling it at him as hard as she can with a piercing shriek. 

The glass hits his flesh shoulder with a dull thump before bouncing to the tile floor and shattering. Bucky’s head swivels slowly as he glances down at the the remains of the glass and then up at her. There is nothing behind his eyes. 

“What the hell is  _ wrong with you?”  _ she cries, slamming the heel of her palm against the edge of the sink. 

“Nothing,” is all he says in a monotone. He rises from the couch to retrieve the broom and dustpan and begins to mechanically sweep up the mess she’s made. He’s a goddamn automaton. A fucking robot butler. 

She throws her hands in the air, literally and figuratively, and stomps off to their bedroom. She kicks off her clogs, ripping her jeans down her legs and tossing them into their open closet. Next comes her t-shirt and bra, until she’s standing in their room in just a pair of panties. She marches to the closet, whipping clothes out of the way until she’s found what she’s looking for. 

The high-waisted skirt is black and heavy, draping over her hips and thighs in an incredibly appealing way. Especially when considering that the top cinched in at her small waist and there was a slit over her left leg that ended at her upper thigh. The top is a white, off the shoulder crop top. She likes it because it cinches tight under her breasts, leaving a three inch gap of bare skin between her skirt and top. It’s also made of a thick, tightly woven fabric that eliminates the need for an actual bra. Once she’s zipped into the thing, she spills out of the top slightly, but she is dead set on getting rip roaring drunk shortly and won’t give a damn about much of anything at that point. She slips on a pair of strappy, red wedges and shoves a wad of cash between her breasts before stomping back out into the common area of the apartment. 

Barnes is back on the couch, as if he’d never moved at all. He glances at her, head tilting slightly. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” she says between clenched teeth.

“Where?”

“A club out in Rocinha.” She grabs the burner phone she’s been using since they landed in Brazil from the kitchen counter and tucks it against the outside of her left breast. She turns to head towards the front door but is blocked by Bucky.

“I’ll go with you,” he says dully.

She blinks up at him, irritation flaring, but tamps it down. “Fine,” she eventually says, stomping past him and leaving him to lock up behind them. 

 

***

 

It’s less of a nightclub and more of a bar housed inside a crumbling brick and mortar building with music blaring from speakers that rumble the ground. It’s dark and the floor is sticky with sweat and liquor, but the bartender looks friendly and the dancefloor is packed with bodies so she can’t really complain. Bucky follows at her back, only peeling away from her once they’re inside. He heads towards a bench that runs along the back wall, nearly disappearing in the darkness that shrouds the area. With a sigh she heads towards the bar and orders four shots of  Cachaça, downing them in rapid succession. She is thankful for the skills she gained in college, which are the only thing saving her from coughing up a lung at the sting of the liquor. She leans against the bar, watching the dancers sway and listening to the percussion-heavy music. 

It takes about ten minutes but she starts to feel the tension leave her body as the start of a buzz creeps over her and her hips begin to twist slowly in time to the music.  She motions to order another shot. She holds out a bill to the bartender, but he waves her away, saying something in rapidfire Portuguese and gesturing at a man sitting on the other end of the bar. She leans over the bar to get a better look and finds him watching her with a friendly smile. He also happens to be incredibly handsome. She raises her shot glass to him with a grin and throws it back with vigor.

His smile widens and he leaves his seat, approaching her with a serpentine swagger. He’s tall and long limbed, with dark skin and eyes that hold promise. He’s even better looking up close with full lips and cheekbones sharp enough to cut. The liquor and his good looks make her stomach twist in excitement when he leans against the bar next to her.

He introduces himself in Portuguese as “Lucas” and she does her damndest to reciprocate. His grin widens at her effort and he listens to her patiently as she tries to remember what she’s learned of the Portuguese language while slightly tipsy. He’s charming and seems like he could show a girl a good time, so when he gestures to her and then to the dancefloor, she nods fervently. His hands slide around her waist, guiding her out and pulling her into him when they are near the center of the crowd.

It’s a tight space that necessitates them being chest to chest and hip to hip, but she thinks that she’d be against him like this anyway. He dances like a dream, hips rolling with hers to samba beats, his big hands tight on her hips to guide her. Her hands are folded over the back of his neck, her head thrown back so he has a stunning view of her chest. The music and the alcohol and the flirtation all have her falling into a sort of trance, her attention focusing down to just the movement of her body against her partner’s. It’s heady and hot, an easy place that she can lose herself in. 

But fate won’t let her forget her problems entirely. She feels her soulbond flare with almost painful intensity. She glances to the shadow of Barnes against the wall, sees him leaning forward, his eyes locked on her, tracing over every inch of her. Desire, thick and hot, slips into her veins and she knows it’s coming from him, can see it in the intensity of his stare and the way his body is practically vibrating with it. 

She could laugh, she’s so relieved to see emotion of  _ any  _ kind on his face, to feel something human from their bond. 

She turns in her partner’s arms, closing her eyes and letting the bubbling relief mix with all the other intoxicants in her system. She stretches her arms over her head, hooking them over Lucas’ shoulders, swiveling her hips and grinding back against him. His mouth descends on her neck, plush lips sliding up to murmur things she doesn’t understand into her ear. His hands loosen their grip on her hips, one sliding up over her belly to rest against the bare skin of her midriff, pressing her back further into him. His other hand slides up along her side until it’s buried in her hair.

She makes a show of it now, dancing for the bright blue eyes that she knows are glued to her still. She’s practically pulsing with the desire that Bucky is feeling. She shivers with it, eyes closed, her hands running over her body, and lips stretched in a wide smile. God, she feels so fucking good right now. 

Two songs come and go before she can’t stand the weight of Bucky’s gaze any longer. She thanks Lucas in broken Portuguese, kissing his cheek as she does. She can see the disappointment in his eyes, but he merely nods and shrugs at her, a sweet smile still in place. Darcy heads back to the bar, orders a caipirinha and carries the sweating glass towards Barnes. She feels light and loose, her hips swaying with each step she takes to her soulmate. 

“Hullo, Barnes, you looked thirsty,” she shouts over the music. She pushes the glass into his hands and proceeds to sink into his lap, the slit in her dress allowing her to easily straddle him. Bucky blinks at her sudden closeness and then downs the mixed drink in three swallows. He rests the empty glass on the little table next to him, not meeting her eyes. 

Darcy doesn’t like that shit one bit and endeavors to regain his attention by leaning forward to lick the lingering drop of alcohol from his lower lip. He gasps and his eyes are locked with her again. She is inordinately pleased with herself in that moment. She feels a little dizzy and leans forward to rest her head against the crook of his neck, rolling her hips down over him hard. He groans into her hair and his hands are suddenly on her, roaming over her hips, her waist, her spine, her shoulders, and then sweeping down to firmly grab her ass. 

“God, yes,” she murmurs against his skin before she starts sucking and nipping at his neck. His head tilts back to lean against the wall, opening up more real estate for her hungry lips. His chest heaves beneath her for several beats until he suddenly darts his hands into her hair and brings her mouth crashing into his. 

Darcy’s brain, what’s left of it after the booze and the heat, completely shuts down as soon as his lips meet hers. His kisses are frantic, greedy. Every fiber in her body is screaming out in affirmation that  _ this  _ is what they should have been doing the entire time. It’s madness, this overwhelming desire. It’s a piece of fucking paradise. 

She shivers when she feels his fingers brush at the slit in her skirt, his nails scraping lightly at the exposed skin. She widens her legs in invitation, nearly swallows her tongue when he starts stroking her. She’s a mewling mess in his arms, muffling her throaty moans into his insistent mouth. When he slides his hand back down to her thigh, the fragile restraint she has snaps. With frantic, unsteady hands, she reaches for his belt, fumbling with the buckle. 

Bucky grips her wrists, pulling them away from their task. She looks up at him in irritation and it takes her a second to realize he’s been saying her name repeatedly, trying to catch her attention.

He meets her eyes, desperation in their depths.  _ “Darcy,” _ he rasps out, his fingers digging into the delicate bones of her wrists. “Please...please, god, not like this.”

The anguish on his face and the rejection are like ice water in her veins, clearing the haze of lust and Brazilian booze from her head long enough for mortification to set it. She scrambles off his lap, wrapping her arms around her waist. She’s drunk and trying to fuck Bucky in a seedy bar and they haven’t even had a proper conversation in a week. What the fuck is  _ wrong  _ with her?

She stammers out an apology, her tongue thick and unwieldy in her mouth, and then outright flees the club. She makes it to the curb before she starts crying, her emotions always so much closer to the surface when she’s shitfaced. She’s sobbing into her hands pathetically when she feels Bucky’s arms come down around her shoulders, tucking her into his chest. She sobs even harder.

“It’s okay, baby,” he murmurs into her hair. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t--you don’t--” He swallows so hard she can hear it over her tears. “We can forget about it, sweetheart. Just pretend it didn’t happen.” 

She finds herself nodding against him, even though she’s not sure she wants to pretend like they hadn’t kissed and that it hadn’t been the most soul-stirring thing she’s felt in her life. 

 

***

 

The next morning is hell, both on her nerves and because she is ridiculously hungover. They don’t bring up the night before, both admirably living up to the deal of pretending it didn't exist. Unfortunately, no power on earth could actually make her  _ forget  _ they way he’d kissed and petted her mere hours ago. 

As embarrassing and frustrating as it is, she counts it a triumph to see that soft, attentive Bucky has returned and the Soldier is nowhere to be found. She’s almost afraid to bring up the change in him, but can’t help it after he brings her the second dose of aspirin and another glass of water. He sets the water on her bedside table but before he leaves she grasps his wrist weakly, pulling him to sit on the bed beside her. 

He obliges, though stiffly, and it takes him long, silent minutes to relax into the headboard while Darcy gets up the courage to speak. She tilts her head against his shoulder, her head throbbing with extra effort of  _ thinking.  _

“You scared me,” she whispers, knowing he’ll hear her perfectly. It’s not what she intended to say, but it’s the truth and the root of the absolute clusterfuck that was the night before.

“What--”

“When you shut down this last week. Haven’t felt you be so soulless since I was a kid.” There’s no accusation in her tone, just a weariness. 

He shifts uncomfortably beside her, twisting his clasped hands where they rest in his lap. “I...I’m sorry, for scaring you. For...going cold.”

“Bucky,  _ why?  _ Why did you do that? What happened?”

He shrugs, careful not to dislodge her head. “I got overwhelmed. Needed to escape.” 

She closes her eyes, shaking her head gently. “Well it was fucking awful. Thought you were gonna flip and snap my neck the first couple days.”

Bucky jerks, leaning away from her so he can meet her gaze. “Never. That’s never gonna happen. I won’t hurt you. You had to have known that.”

“How? How would I know that, Bucky? You shut down your own humanity and shut me out along with it. You wouldn’t even  _ look  _ at me properly, let alone make the effort to reassure me that you hadn’t regressed into a murder machine.” 

He stares at her for a long time, eyes roaming over her face. “I’m sorry, Darcy,” he murmurs. 

“You don’t have to keep apologizing. Just--just don’t do it again. Please? I can’t spend the rest of my life with an empty shell.” 

There is moisture collecting along his lower lashes as he nods. He blinks hard, licks at his lips before replying. “I won’t. I won’t, okay?”

She nods, leaning back into him to rest her head on his shoulder again. They’re quiet for long enough that she slips into sleep.

 

***

 

The following days are shaky between them. They’ve lost some of the ease that they’d just begun to share and now they both feel as if their skin doesn’t fit quite right whenever they’re together. They’re polite, kind even, to each other, but hesitant in a way that will grow irritating if they don’t find their rhythm again soon. 

Bucky holds her at night again. She wakes up each morning twisted up with him again and it’s a start. 

Their month in Rio is almost up and despite the embarrassing memories that she’d like to leave behind, she isn’t quite ready to move yet again. 

“Do we have to leave?” she begs one evening during their last week in Rio. He’s started consolidating his possessions in preparation for their exodus and it’s making her twitchy. Her bags remain completely unpacked out of rebellion. 

“Too many eyes and ears in the city, doll. Gotta keep moving,” he says absently, neatly folding a pair of pants and tucking them into his duffle on the bed. 

She folds her arms over her chest and scoots down, further entrenching herself beneath the coverlet in subtle defiance. “Where are we going?” 

He glances up, grabs a shirt and starts folding. “Somewhere in Argentina. Most likely Buenos Aires for a couple weeks, then Cordoba probably.”

“Why do we keep going to the big cities if there are so many ‘eyes and ears’ everywhere?” She absolutely isn’t pouting. 

He looks up at her slowly. “Huh?”

She rolls her eyes, uncrossing her arms to flop them down on either side of her. “You keep moving me all over the continent because there are too many people in the cities that could rat on us or whatever. Why not move out to the middle of fucking nowhere and just...stay?”

He blinks at her. “I--” His head ducks down and she can see the cogs in his head turning before he looks back up at her. “I just never considered it. I’ve...well, I’ve really only functioned on my own in cities before?”

She stares at him for a solid minute before she tosses her head back with a cackle. “Are you telling me that the reason you’ve been running me ragged all over god’s green earth is because you’re too much of a fucking  _ city boy  _ to even think about hiding out in the country?”

His mouth pinches together, a perturbed look flitting over his face. “I understand my resources in a city. It’s familiar. I can protect us here. Provide for us. Hide us. I don’t know how to do those things in the middle of nowhere.”

“Bucky. If we’re the only people around for miles, you don’t have to do any of those things. Hell, get us a little house with a clear view for miles and if anyone even thought about attacking us you’d  _ literally _ see it coming from a mile away. And we’ve still got a ton of cash. Think about it. We could just...stay put. Enjoy the quiet of the country. Freaking relax for once.”

“We’ll go to Buenos Aires.” He’s stubborn and won’t say yes but he does try to appease her somewhat. “I’ll think about it once we’re there.” 

Darcy harumphs and gives a little acquiescing nod but digs out the (probably illegally acquired) laptop that they’ve been using and starts looking up rental properties in the remotest areas of Argentina that she can find. He might not be saying yes, but Darcy Lewis can always sense when a victory is near and she damn sure knows how to wear a man down into submission. 

**Author's Note:**

> Just a heads up, Darcy may come off as slightly cold in the first couple chapters. I promise you she's not. She's just very super duper freaked out, unprepared, and 100% completely in denial. Don't worry. By the end of the next chapter she will get her head out of her ass. 
> 
> Also, took a lot of inspiration from Ben Howard's "In Dreams". It's a gorgeous song and really fits the melancholy mood for the majority of this fic, honestly. The lyrics fit beautifully from Bucky's perspective as well, so if you wanna give it a listen and look up the lyrics and think about Bucky Barnes and cry a lot then feel free to do that.


End file.
